Amazon made cord cutting a little bit easier on Thursday for fans of the likes of “Westworld” and “Game of Thrones” with the launch of HBO on Amazon Channels. Prime members can sign up for HBO for $14.99/month, and are being offered a 30-day free trial. The HBO Now standalone service also costs $14.99/month, but fans of the Amazon Prime universe might want to take the offer to make their content discovery experience a little more seamless.
Cinemax on Amazon Channels also became available with a $9.99/month price tag, and a 30-day free trial.
Amazon Channels, which launched in 2015 for members who pony up the $99/year Prime fee, offers users the option to pay for only the channels a viewer wants, so no cable package is required. It boasts compatibility with more than 650 compatible devices, self-service cancellation, and custom lineups from more than 80 premium and specialty channels.
The key to the new partnerships seems to revolve around consumers’ growing desire to limit the number of login hoops they have to jump to get to their stories quickly.
As Paul Stathacopoulos, VP of strategy and strategic research at TiVo, observed recently: “The media industry is facing a perfect storm with increased choice and access to content, at the cost of massive fragmentation and frustrated consumers. The coveted Millennial demographic is in the eye of this storm, consuming the most content across the most services and platforms. However, members of this generation have short attention spans, and they are the most likely to ‘show dump’ when access to content becomes challenging.”
More on TiVo’s research around the content discovery topic is available here.