Amazon Uses Streaming Video for "Content Marketing"

Amazon.com has some advantages as a content marketer. Like other retailers of "content" or "entertainment" products, it can use trailers, book reviews and descriptions as content marketing vehicles. But unusually, even for a content retailer, Amazon has the ability to give away professional content as part of a direct revenue model.

Amazon Prime is a membership service that, for $79 a year, gives Amazon customers free shipping on their purchases as well as no-extra-charge access to the Prime Instant Video streaming library. The Amazon Prime membership is a revenue-generating loyalty device, which provides clear incentives for members to keep buying from Amazon.

Pursuant to that strategy, Amazon.com added a new licensing agreement with NBCUniversal Domestic TV Distribution that will allow Amazon Prime members to stream select Universal Pictures movies through Prime Instant Video. This deal with Amazon will bring the total number of Prime instant videos to more than 9,000 movies and TV shows in the summer fo 2011.

Sometimes it is harder to see the tie between content marketing and a firm's revenue model. There is no such obscurity in the case of Amazon Prime Instant Video.

Amazon Adds More Content