Amazon on Thursday was accused of inflating its Amazon Prime video catalog counts, an accusation the company confirmed just a few short hours after the news was released.
Amazon told Fast Company that it chose to include every single TV episode as a show which means long-running TV series can account for hundreds, even thousands of shows in the company’s catalog.
According to reports the company’s 17,000 titles includes just 1,875 titels, all but 150 of which were movies.
In comparison Amazon’s biggest competitor Netflix has managed to outright ignore movie and TV show counts in order to stay honest with its customer base. Netflix also relies on movies that constantly go in and out of rotation which forces the company to avoid providing numbers because they are never consistent. Regardless Amazon claims to have a larger overall library when compared to Amazon Prime thanks to its early
The video streaming pioneer claims a larger library, although it’s helped along by having been active well ahead of Amazon Primes own video streaming service.
In the meantime iTunes has an even larger collection of TV shows and movies although those offers come at a per title cost, a model studios prefer for their more recent titles.
Why Amazon chose to misdirect customers over its Amazon Prime video count is not known however its likely the company wanted to give a feel of superiority over Netflix and other services while quickly trying to grab more partnerships that would allow the service to actually grow organically.
