Amazon Backs Ad-Supported TV Model With Freevee App
Amazon is renaming its free streaming app IMDb TV to the more catchy Freevee, as the company leans into the ad-supported free television model.
Despite the growing success of Amazon Prime Video, IMDb still boasts 120 million monthly viewers.
It describes itself as “a modern TV network,” and features large swathes of legacy content, including major franchises such as Lost and Friday Night Lights. New episodes of Judge Judy are now exclusive too IMDb, and Amazon will no doubt dump most of its golden era MGM catalogue onto the rebranded Freevee. Like old TV networks, the content is spliced with advertising, a lucrative and age-old business model.
IMDb launched in 2019, as IMDB Freedive, before rebranding to IMDb TV later that same year.
Last May, Amazon revealed its IMDb audience had doubled in the previous twelve months, and “lucrative demographics were averaging about five and a half hours a week on the service.”
Given Amazon’s substantial reliance on advertising dollars, it makes sense for the company to bolster its free TV offering while also building Prime membership.