Amazon steps up to become YouTube's rival

[Courtesy of Amazon]

Amazon, one of the world's largest online shopping services, started "Amazon Video Direct" (AVD) service Tuesday, allowing its users to upload their own video contents.

ADV is a new advertisement supported video service which resembles Alphabet's YouTube by letting its users upload video contents. The users' creations can be made available for other users to rent or own, to watch free with advertisements, or to be included in a package subscription, Amazon said.

"It’s an amazing time to be a content creator," said Jim Freeman, Vice President of Amazon Video. "There are more options for distribution than ever before and with Amazon Video Direct, for the first time, there’s a self-service option for video providers to get their content into a premium streaming subscription service."

The uploaded video will be available for Amazon's Prime subscription users. Amazon Prime video service is available in the US, Germany, Austria, the UK, and Japan. Amazon seeks to expand its services worldwide starting from India later this year.

According to Amazon's announcements, the e-commerce giant will share 50 percent of the revenue made from rentals and sales of the contents with the creators. For advertisement supported contents, its creators will receive will get half of the net advertisement sales.

Along with ADV, Amazon also launched "AVD Stars Program". The company is to give the contents creators a one million US dollars fund based on the top 100 AVD titles offered in Prime Video, Amazon's already existing video-on-demand (VOD) service which provided contents such as films, TV dramas and exclusive Amazon video contents.

Amazon also recently launched a monthly subscription for the standalone video streaming service, similar to Netflix's, for a monthly fee of 8.99 dollars.

Aju News Park Sae-jin = swatchsjp@ajunews.com

Park Sae-jin swatchsjp@ajunews.com

Amazon steps up to become YouTube's rival

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