Amazon's Freevee, the future FAST window of Prime Video?

Amazon is about to publish its quarterly results for Q3 2022. The end of the health crisis, at least in terms of movement restrictions and business operations, the inflationary pressures and the subsequent decrease in purchasing power have significantly impacted the e-commerce giant and hence, its profitability. While Amazon still announced a 7% growth last quarter in terms of revenues, its operating result has been divided by more than two ($3.3 billion versus $7.7 billion a year ago). In this context, is it in the best interest of the group to fully integrate its AVOD platform Freevee as a free window integrated within Prime Video, in an attempt to increase the conversion rate to the SVOD service? After the international launch of Prime Video at the end of 2016 and the acquisition of Twitch during the summer of 2014, Freevee is the third major asset of Amazon's video entertainment strategy. In only three years the service has already experienced many changes in its branding, from IMDB Freedive at its launch to IMDB TV during the summer of 2020 before finally adopting Freevee in April 2022. As of today, Freevee has been available in the US, the UK since last fall, and in Germany since last summer. A growing presence, but a growth below average Freevee's content offer has significantly strengthened over the last year. The platform also announced two acquisition deals with NBC Universal and Disney last spring and communicated a 70% rise in original programming costs year-on-year. Hence, 16 originals are currently available on the website -movies or shows-, with three more to come in November (Judy Justice, season 2, Play-Doh squished, and Leverage: Redemption season 2). Freevee's offer in the US also provides 129 FAST channels. In addition to the distribution over Amazon's ecosystem (Echo Show, Fire TV…), Freevee is also widely available across the OTT landscape in the US: Dongles and OTT boxes from Roku, Android TV, Google TV and Apple TV Samsung and LG Smart TVs Xbox and Playstation game consoles Android and iOS smartphones and tablets Overall, Freevee US represents the free version of the distribution and content curation strategy applied by Amazon to Prime Video and Amazon Channels for years, with quite a success as the number of monthly active users to Freevee tripled between 2019 and 2020, with a 20% growth rate in 2021, to finally reach 60 million. Freevee followed the massive adoption of streaming content, benefiting from Amazon's synergies. However, both its growth rate and market share has been lowering since 2021 compared to its competitors. According to a survey conducted by Xperi/Tivo during the first semester of 2022, Freevee only accounted for 7% of the AVOD consumption, far behind Roku...