Nearly nine months after denying any plans to shutter its ad-supported Freevee streaming service, Amazon has announced it will do just that, all within a matter of a weeks.
In a statement to Variety, Amazon said that Freevee’s free content will be absorbed into Prime Video, with the idea being to turn Amazon’s premiere streaming service into a “first-stop video destination.”
Despite the “phase out” of Freevee, Amazon pledged there would be “no change to the content available for Prime members,” while non-Prime users will get a “vast offering” of free streaming content.
Sunsetting the Freevee brand will “deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers,” Amazon said.
The news comes severeal months after AdWeek reported that Amazon was poised to close down Freevee and slide its content over to Prime Video.
At the time, Amazon flatly denied the story, with a company rep saying that “Freevee remains an important streaming offering” for both Prime and non-Prime users.
First launched as IMDb Freedrive in 2019 before a rebranding to IMDb TV six months later, Freevee offers a mix of on-demand and ad-supported TV shows and movies as well as a wide variety of FAST (short for “free ad-supported streaming TV”) channels.
Amazon gave the Freevee rebrand (or re-rebrand) a splashy unveiling back in April 2022, complete with new shows such as Bosch: Legacy and original movies.
Freevee also had at least one bona fide hit: Jury Duty, a reality show in which an unsuspecting juror served in a fake trial populated by actors, including James Marsden.
But Freevee and Prime Video always made for odd bedfellows, with the former’s content accessible via Prime Video under the latter’s “free for me” setting. Plenty of paying Prime Video subscribers, myself included, were often surprised to find Freevee’s ad-supported content mixed in with Prime Video’s ad-free offerings.
The picture became even more clouded with the arrival of Prime Video’s ad-supported tier, meaning Amazon had two ad-supported services but with different branding.
Despite Amazon’s earlier denials, the writing has long been on the wall for Freevee, so news of Freevee’s demise doesn’t come as a big shock.
