When Amazon and Apple went into the television business, many saw the moves as a vanity play, a way for company executives to meet Hollywood royalty, not a smart business play.
“In its six-ish years of existence, Apple TV+ has mostly operated as a sort of vanity project, largely immune to such quotidian concerns as profit, revenue, and return on investment,” Puck reported.
The American Prospect’s David Dayen was particularly harsh when judging Amazon’s video efforts.
“Why does Amazon run a streaming video service? Why does it run a Hollywood movie studio? Businesses generally try to make money. We don’t know that to be the case for Amazon’s streaming, and its film and digital production, because film and television are not broken out as separate revenue streams,” he wrote.
Both companies have been questioned about whether they’re making television shows and movies to actually make money.
Apple has yet to answer that question, but Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was emphatic about his company’s video efforts during its third-quarter earnings call.
Amazon Prime Video makes money
I’m a fan of Amazon Prime Video and watch multiple shows on the platform. I pay for Prime because it offers free two-day, and sometimes next-day, or even same-day shipping, but if Amazon asked for a separate subscription fee for its video service, I’d almost certainly pay it.
Amazon does not charge separately for its video service. Instead, it has leveraged Prime Video to make members more loyal.
That’s a loss leader strategy, but the company has found ways to make Prime Video work as a business, not just a vanity project.
“Prime Video has emerged as a significant business with a revenue run rate in the tens of billions of dollars, now profitable in its own right. We have momentum with hit shows like ‘Carrie,’ ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty,’ ‘The Boys,’ ‘Off Campus,’ ‘Reacher,’ and ‘Fallout.’ Breakout movies like ‘Project Hail Mary,’ along with compelling live sports, including Thursday Night Football, off to its best start ever in 2026, NBA on Prime, NASCAR, the Masters, and UEFA Champions League soccer,” Jassy said.
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Amazon does not break out Prime Video’s financials or subscribers separately.
However, the service’s ad tier reaches more than 315 million monthly active users globally, including more than 130 million in the United States alone, according to The Wrap.
Video users can pay a fee of $4.99 per month to upgrade to an ad-free experience.
Apple TV is a money loser, but that may not be the whole story. Shutterstock
Apple TV is not making money
Much like I would choose to pay extra for Prime Video, I do actually pay for Apple TV. It’s $14.99 a month on its own, but I have bundled it with other Apple services, which brings the overall cost down slightly.
Apple TV does not offer the same volume of shows as Netflix or Prime, but it has prestige offerings, including “Severance,” “Shrinking,” and “Pluribus,” that I have found worth the price.
The Apple TV+ premium subscription service is losing more than $1 billion per year, according to an anonymously sourced report by The Information.
“The tech giant is spending around $4.5 billion on content annually, down from $5 billion in past years, according to the article.”
Apple TV+ — which features virtually an all-original lineup — has about 45 million subscribers.
The streaming service has worked to bring Apple positive attention.
“Apple TV+ spends less than any major competitor, wins more awards per dollar than all of them, and still loses over a billion dollars a year. That paradox is the most interesting business story in Hollywood right now,” High on Films reported.
That’s not the same as being a successful business.
“This is not an argument that Apple TV+ is well-run. It may not be. It is an argument that the numbers, laid out honestly, tell a stranger and more interesting story than the conventional narrative, which is simply that Apple built an expensive vanity project that nobody watches,” the site added.
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