Amazon has announced that it will rebrand its free, ad-supported streaming service – IMDb TV – to Amazon FreeVee, starting April 27. The company has also said it intends to ramp up its slate of Originals on the service by 70% this year.
Original titles to be added to the service include Hollywood Houselift with Jeff Lewis, Australian crime drama Troppo, Highschool, and workplace rom-com Love Accidentally. The service also struck a licensing deal with NBCUniversal, securing exclusive network-window rights for films from Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, including titles such as Dolittle, The Invisible Man, Promising Young Woman, as well as rights to several animated movies, including Sing 2. Amazon has said the service will announce new programming for Amazon FreeVee later this year.
Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon Studios said: “Over the past two years, we have seen tremendous growth for our AVOD service and are committed to bringing our audiences premium, free-to-consumer content. We’re looking forward to building on this momentum with an increasing slate of inventive and broadly appealing Originals, and are excited to establish Freevee as the premier AVOD service with content audiences crave.”
Ashraf Alkarmi, Director of Freevee commented: “Customers are increasingly shifting to streaming ad-supported premium content, and we have developed Freevee to deliver them highly sought content with half the commercials of traditional TV. Our new name clearly communicates who we are: An easy-to-navigate streaming service, available to users for free, whenever and wherever they choose to watch some of the greatest Original and licensed content available.”
According to Amazon, IMDb TV has tripled its monthly active users over the last two years. The company attributes this growth to “rapid distribution across living room devices and mobile, an increasing slate of Originals, an always updating library of highly sought movies and TV shows, and over 60 FAST channels.” The service originally launched in January 2019 under the name Freedive.
