“Amazon boasts that it has “more than 17,000 movies and television shows” on Amazon Prime Instant Video, its streaming service that competes with Netflix and Hulu Plus,” Austin Carr reports for Fast Company. “The “17,000” figure has been widely parroted in the media, but where does the number come from?”
“Upon closer examination, the total number of movies and TV shows available to Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year, is actually far lower,” Carr reports. “Only 1,745 movies are available to stream on the company’s Prime service, and just roughly 150 TV series. The ‘17,000’ figure is not only misleading to consumers, but a faulty indicator of Amazon’s streaming library’s strength versus competitors and traditional entertainment offerings.”
Carr reports, “Amazon reached that number by counting each episode of a TV series as an individual TV show… Amazon counts The X-Files more than 200 times and Grey’s Anatomy 170 times… Power Rangers-related episodes are counted as about 715 shows in its streaming library–that is, 4.2% of the 17,000 movies and television shows Amazon says it offers.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]