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Amazon just announced that it is laying off hundreds of employees from Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Senior Vice President at Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios Mike Hopkins announced the job cuts in an email Wednesday. He wrote that “several hundred roles” were being terminated.
Amazon slashes jobs…
Hopkins' email read, “Our industry continues to evolve quickly and it’s important that we prioritize our investments for the long-term success of our business, while relentlessly focusing on what we know matters most to our customers.”
“Throughout the past year, we’ve looked at nearly every aspect of our business with an eye towards improving our ability to deliver even more breakthrough movies, TV shows, and live sports in a personalized, easy to use entertainment experience for our global customers. As a result, we’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact,” the email continued.
The news also comes before Amazon's announcement that Prime Video starting hosting ads on Jan. 29. Users will have to pay an extra $2.99 on top of their Prime subscription to avoid the ads. Prime Video subscribers can pre-register for the ad-free option. This strategy is reputed to earn billions of dollars in revenue.
but adds advertising
This move was announced December 2023, and the rollout of what Amazon describes as “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers” will begin for the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada. France Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia will also start seeing ads on Prime Video later this year.
Amazon terminated more than 25,000 jobs in March 2023, mainly from the advertising and Twitch, its live streaming service. The following month, the company laid off about 100 employees from Prime Video technology and MGM. Included in this year's round of cuts are 500 employees at Twitch.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote in a note, “As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible.”
“Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch. This will be a very hard day. Our service exists to empower communities to create, together, and every single one of you has played a vital role in fostering our community and furthering that mission,” the note continued.
“Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today. As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future,” Clancy concluded.
This recent round of layoffs will impact Prime Video and Amazon MGM. This begs the question as to how these cuts will affect the newly announced series and movies, as well as the recently renewed series.
