After increasing the prices of its Prime formula all over the world, Amazon is considering a low-cost subscription with fewer services called Amazon Prime Lite. It remains to be seen whether it will be offered in France…
Admittedly, the Amazon Prime subscription offers many advantages to subscribers: it makes deliveries “free” and priority – some products can be delivered the same evening! –, offers access to the video-on-demand service (Prime Video), to 100 million music titles to listen to offline (Prime Music), and to a selection of digital books (Prime Reading) and video games (Prime Gaming). A kind of all-in-one formula! Formula which is however becoming more and more expensive, as evidenced by the significant increase in subscription prices in France in July, especially since the e-commerce giant seems to be adopting an economic strategy straight out of satellite and its various packages – it has just acquired the HBO programs in France via the Pass Warner. One of the solutions could be some kind of subscription low-cost, which would cut the pear in half. This is what he is currently testing in India – a country where poverty is very present and unfortunately increasing – with Amazon Prime Lite, a subscription available to certain users only. As reported by Techcrunchit costs 999 rupees a year (just over 11 euros), compared to 1,499 rupees (about 17 euros) for 12 months of standard Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime Lite: soon a low cost subscription?
Amazon Prime Lite being cheaper, it necessarily offers fewer services. With this offer, subscribers receive the famous free delivery in two days instead of one, and have access to Prime Video, the streaming service of the e-commerce giant. Note, however, that the latter broadcasts advertising and only offers a 480p definition – you must therefore ignore HD, Full HD or 4K HDR. Amazon is still a little clever because in 2016, when its platform was launched in India, the standard subscription cost precisely 999 rupees, before increasing to the current price in 2021. This new formula could therefore be a way for the company to find subscribers lost with the increase in prices and to win new ones. It also launched a few weeks ago the Prime Gaming service in the territory.
Amazon seems to be testing other ways to expand its market and influence. In particular, he set up, again with a small panel of handpicked users, Amazon Inspire, a kind of social network that wants to make shopping as “entertaining” as TikTok – above all, he wants to make the customer dependent and push him to compulsive buying – and Amazon Shopper Panel, a service that allows him to track users and take all their personal data in exchange for a few dollars a month – spoiler: we strongly advise against it. Here, the firm seems rather eyeing the side of its SVOD competitors with low-cost subscriptions financed by advertising, Netflix having recently rolled out its Essential formula at 5.99 euros and Disney + preparing to do the same with its Basic subscription in 2023. It remains to be seen whether Amazon Prime Lite will eventually arrive here, which could prove interesting, especially with the proliferation of SVODs.