- Amazon has expanded its ‘Shop the Show’ feature for Prime Video shows
- It lets you see and buy products from the movie or show you’re watching
- But will this mean more product placement in Prime Video originals?
Amazon has brought its “Shop The Show” program into its US app, enabling you to easily find products related to specific movies and shows – and it’s just upped the number of shoppable shows to over 1,300.
The idea is simple enough: let’s say you’re watching The Boys and want to buy some tie-in merchandise. Simply open the Amazon app, search for “Shop the show” and you can then find an organized collection of products related to the hit show.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m immune to wanting the odd bit of merch, but I do worry what this means for future Prime Video originals. Because I think the temptation to stuff them with sales opportunities in the form of ever-more-annoying product placement is going to be impossible for Amazon to resist.
Why I worry about Shop the Show
I’m worried about combining shows and selling because every time a streamer attempts to make more money from its users, which of course is what Shop the Show is designed to do, it makes the service worse.
For example, after sitting through the pre-show ads last night on Disney+, my episode of Andor was interrupted by another ad after just four minutes. And on Prime Video my Bosch Legacy viewings suffered at the hands of automated ad breaks that didn’t care whether they were mid-scene or breaking tension. I tried to watch a concert video on YouTube the other evening and the first ads didn’t even wait for the first song to finish.
What worries me about Shop the Show is that this particular kind of monetization scheme could ruin programs even further, with ‘Amazon the shop’ pushing more and more product placement into ‘Amazon the streamer’.
For streamers, product placement is even better than ads. You can’t skip it, and you can’t pay to get rid of it. And you can put it into existing shows that didn’t previously have it: as advertising publication The Drum reports, Amazon has experimented with virtual product placement – adding products into existing content – in multiple ways.
Product placement isn’t anything new, of course. And I’m writing on a website that generates some of its revenue from linking to online retailers. But I don’t work for those retailers, and I don’t write with them in mind – just as in TV, where the show’s maker is not usually the retailer of the products being placed on screen. That distance between the craft and the commerce usually limits how blatant the product placement can be.
With Amazon and Prime Video, the show maker and the shop are the same company. Different divisions, sure, but think of the synergy.
I hope I’m wrong, and that Amazon doesn’t let the sales stuff affect what’s on screen. I’m all for making it easier to find the books Bosch is based on, or the video games that led to the Fallout show. But when I look at my Amazon search results and remember when they used to show me what I wanted rather than what Amazon wants to show me, I can’t say I’m very optimistic.
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