Amongst the companies set to be entering the year 2014 on a strong note in America is Amazon and their streaming division, after they announced having surpassed a total of 20 million subscribers of the Amazon Prime service in their ‘best ever’ overall holiday season.
The announcement means that the $79/year platform is ending 2013 with an unprecedented ‘tens of millions’ when it comes to individual users, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also noted that their main retail site attracted its ‘best-ever’ holiday shopping figures, with online purchases totalling 36.8 million alone on the widely-accepted opening sales day known as ‘Cyber Monday’.
The trends seem to reflect that of global growth when it comes to worldwide e-commerce sales, though full totals from Amazon will only be revealed in their fourth-quarter earnings report.
The Amazon Prime statement was the headlining feature of Bezos’ notes, though, as experts cite this as being the closest that the American company have ever come to lifting the lid on their Prime subscriber numbers, following on from external estimates in September placing the total at 16 million at the end of September, indicating a strong advance by the brand in the holiday period if both figures are accurate.
Whilst the ‘free shipping’ options are generally considered the main attraction of the platform for most consumers, the streaming platform Amazon Instant Video (available through Prime as Amazon Prime Instant Video) has also been going strongly, as has their ‘instant access’ offer for Kindle Books, both of which are also provided with strong ties to the dedicated Amazon Kindle Fire tablet computer brand.
Bezos stated of Prime overall: “Prime was so popular this holiday, that Amazon limited new Prime membership signups during peak periods to ensure service to current members was not impacted by the surge in new membership. Amazon Prime membership continues to grow, and we now have tens of millions of members worldwide. They benefit from all-you-can-eat free two-day shipping on millions of eligible items and our members have a voracious appetite. We are extremely grateful to our customers around the world and wish everyone the very best for the coming year.”
With plenty of potential customers to reach directly, though, will Amazon in the new year be able to convince their millions-strong influx of subscribers to come for the shipping, stay for the streaming?