Why Amazon and Netflix are embroiled in the fight of the century

The battle for viewership in the streaming age is well and truly joined. Amazon and Netflix, the two leading players in this market, have both redoubled their efforts to get the upper hand in market share, creating original programming and investing in its infrastructure.

Netflix, notably, has a ‘Long Term View’, first outlined a year ago and updated several times since, asserting that as “apps are replacing channels, remote controls are disappearing, and screens are proliferating…linear TV is popular, but ripe for replacement.”

Amazon, however, has an industry leading cloud infrastructure behind it, as well as $61bn in revenue compared to Netflix’s $3.6bn. Netflix, not surprisingly, has the upper hand in terms of subscribers, but it’s not an open and shut case – 30m for Netflix with 7.8m outside the US, compared to 10m for Amazon Prime. Crucially, two thirds (67%) of streaming subscribers use Netflix …