Here’s the biggest problem with Amazon Prime Video—and how it could be fixed

October 1 is the official kickoff of spooky-movie season, but this year, we simply could not wait. On the last day of September, my wife and I watched the 2013 throwback slasher, You’re Next, one of many horror movies available to stream that I’d compiled into a seasonal list. Good thing we didn’t wait until the next night, though—by then, You’re Next was no longer on Prime Video. We’d made it just under the wire.

Successfully streaming a movie in time probably shouldn’t feel like a victory. Yet, considering what I’ve come to discover about Amazon’s service, it too often does.

One of the best things about a streaming film library is that it’s brimming with surprises; new movies, old movies you’ve never heard of, old movies you’ve heard of but never seen, and classics that are new to the platform. Prime Video has all of these in spades, quietly hosting perhaps the most robust rotating-movie roster around, for the monthly cost of $14.99 for a Prime membership—or the Prime Video-only cost of $8.99—plus an additional monthly $2.99 for those who prefer to do their movie viewing ad-free. Looking closely, however, the biggest surprise about Prime’s offerings is how quickly they disappear.

Vanishing movies

Looking closely is something I do with lots of streaming services. Toward the end of each month, I sneak a peek at what’s coming soon on each and make a list of the most enticing movies and shows. The most generous way to describe this obsessive behavior is through the lens of Einstein’s habit of wearing the same outfit every day—it whittles down whole galaxies of entertainment options into a relatively short list that prevents decision fatigue. For some viewers, knowing that Death Becomes Her, 22 Jump Street, and Trainspotting will all be on Prime next month means three nights where they won’t need to know anything else.

Over time, though, I realized I’d been subconsciously prioritizing Prime movies most often. Something was compelling me to get to them as quickly as possible: Prime Video’s window of availability is significantly shorter on average than any other major streaming service.

As an experiment, I looked back through the most well-known titles that arrived on the platform in July and August—a category that includes the Adam Sandler breakout Billy Madison, archetypal David Lynch indie Blue Velvet, and the Coen Brothers’ bleak Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men—to see how many were still available in October. Going a step further, I did the same with Prime’s principal competitors: Max, Hulu, and Netflix, leaving out original movies, like Netflix’s recent Beverly Hills Cop sequel, since those are meant to live on the platform in perpetuity, and have no bearing on the experiment.

The results confirmed what I’d intuited about the ephemerality of movies on Amazon’s service. Of 43 well-known titles arriving on Prime Video in July for subscribers to stream, only 16% remain three months later. For Max, that figure is double, at 32% (11 of 34.) Hulu has even greater retention, with 46% of its well-known July offerings (12 of 26) hanging around, while Netflix had the best rate of all, at 75% (12 of 16.) Based on these numbers, Amazon appears to have made the calculation that its subscribers value novelty over longevity.

The difference in staying power between Amazon and the other platforms becomes even more pronounced when examining their August offerings. Of the 26 popular titles Prime Video added that month, only 34% remain in October. In contrast, 100% of both Max’s and Netflix’s August titles are still available—12 of 12 and 17 of 17, respectively—and Hulu lags only slightly behind at 87% (25 of 29.) In other words, all streamers endure some churn in their film libraries every three months, with Netflix on the low end and Prime Video on the high end—but of these four major streamers, only Prime Video has relatively high churn every two months.

That’s more than a minor complication; it’s a fundamental difference in what “availability” even means on Amazon’s service: Here today; gone (two months from) tomorrow.

Prizing novelty over longevity

As a strategy, it’s pretty shrewd. A flotilla of ticking clocks is excellent motivation for using a service more often. Subscribers who know—or at least intuit—that any of these titles could be gone rather soon have a sense of smoke-‘em-if-you-got-‘em urgency about watching. It’s a luxury complaint that a platform with an abundance of extremely watchable movies refreshes its content so frequently that it’s hard to keep up. While Redditors on r/PrimeVideo seem to notice the short window from time to time, no major backlash seems to have emerged.

Beyond driving frequency of demand, the quick turnaround also reduces the overall cost of licensing fees, with shorter availability periods costing less. It also likely generates further revenue because, unlike Netflix, users can still pony up to rent a movie on Amazon once it stops streaming for subscribers. To any viewers who find themselves in exactly the mood to watch the 2020 version of Jane Austin’s Emma one day after it disappears from Prime Video, leaving only the 1996 Emma and the 1997 Emma streaming in its wake, a $4 fee might be chump change.

There might also be another factor driving the short shelf lives of these movies. Without glimpsing Amazon’s internal data—Amazon representatives did not respond to a request for comment—there’s also the possibility that some of the platform’s costlier titles are set up to leave at an earlier date only if they fall beneath a certain viewership threshold.

A better experience for Prime members?

Whatever the explanation, where the shrewdness of all those ticking clocks threatens to curdle into something closer to contempt for one’s subscribers is in leaving the ticking clocks invisible.

There’s a simple solution, of course: Advertise when movies are leaving!

Adding either a Leaving Soon tag on departing titles, as Netflix does, or creating a Last Chance vertical, like Max has, would arm users with the data to make an informed viewing decision. To be fair, anyone who clicks on a Prime title like the 2022 AirBnB horror hit, Barbarian, on the day of this writing would see a line of text on the film’s landing page that reads “Leaving in 10 days.” At that point, though, subscribers will have already chosen the movie. They no longer need the warning. It’s like seeing a safe expiration date on milk only after you’ve already poured a glass.

Adding a clearer indication of which films are leaving at which time is such a simple fix, neglecting to do it feels like a deliberate strategy for cultivating the most chaotic film library of them all. There are plenty of more innocent explanations, but devising The Silently Shrinking Movie Inventory on purpose would be a fiendish plot of such diabolical brilliance, it’s just the sort of thing people might be into around October.