Amazon: A Dark Underbelly or Just Low Cost Content?
February 20, 2020
Here is something they don’t tell you when you sign up for that $120/year Amazon Prime membership. From Vox’s article, “The Dark Underbelly of Amazon Prime Video,” we learn that almost two-thirds of the service’s streaming videos are user-generated. There also seems to be little to no vetting of this content. That explains why it is difficult to find something good to watch on the platform if one is not searching for something specific. The piece cites a recent feature from the Wall Street Journal. Writer Marc Atkins adds:
“We did some more sleuthing and found even more weird and potentially offensive content. It’s almost as though Amazon welcomes the bad videos, which count toward the total number of titles available on Prime Video. According to Ampere Analytics, Amazon Prime Video boasts 65,504 distinct titles — almost 10 times the 7,177 on Netflix. Users who upload videos, WSJ reports, also get a small cut of revenue based on how many people watch their videos, so there’s an incentive to upload even more. A quick glance at what turned up in a handful of search results shows that quantity can outweigh quality.”
Atkins lists a few examples, from mere oddities to the truly bizarre. See the write-up for those titles. He continues:
“We’ve come to expect off-putting content from social behemoths like Facebook and Google’s YouTube, where many regular people — and the occasional coordinated efforts from foreign governments — post their memes and videos. Amazon Prime Video, on the other hand, presents itself as a Netflix competitor, and that might lead its users to believe that the content on the platform has been vetted. To the average user, it’s not even clear that any of the content on Amazon Prime Video is user-generated, much less the majority of it. Unlike YouTube, Amazon doesn’t label user-generated content as such.”
That is misleading, to say the least. The WSJ article reports Amazon does use both AI and human reviewers to screen for offensive or illegal content. However, Atkins is dubious about their effectiveness, considering the gems he turned up in his search.
And the content may cost less than a Hollywood blockbuster conjured from Jack Warner’s former stomping grounds.
Cynthia Murrell, February 20, 2020
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