If you needed any more proof that branding is out of control, consider the following sentence: Amazon today announced that more than 100 Amazon Originals, which first appeared on Amazon Prime Video, will be made available for free on Amazon Freevee.
Or, in other words, you’ll be able to watch things like The Wheel of Time, Reacher, A League of Their Own, and LuLa Rich — to name but a few — for free, without a subscription to Amazon Prime.
And to confuse things just a little more, the Freevee Originals channel that’s been on Amazon Freevee is now known as Amazon Originals (still on Amazon Freevee).
Not everything is making the leap, it appears. Though starting May 26, you’ll be able to watch the first three episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty free on Freevee — presumably as a way to entice non-Prime subscribers to sign up.
It’s all part of the continuing trend of video-on-demand services also getting into the FAST business, by which free ad-supported streaming television provides another source of revenue, in addition to the subscription side of the business. And in this case, Amazon is able to double-dip with the same content (Paramount also does that with Paramount+), in addition to having more than 250 other FAST channels available within Freevee, not unlike competitors Tubi (owned by Fox), Pluto (owned by Paramount), and The Roku Channel.
Amazon Freevee is a standalone app on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google TV, Android TV, on various smart TVs, on gaming consoles, and on mobile devices. It’s also available within the Amazon Prime Video app.
