‘Tis the season to be jolly and there’s a wealth of seasonal content to put a smile on our faces from video streaming services to goofy YouTube videos to interactive games.

Video is everywhere. It’s easy to access. It’s fun to watch. It’s available on any device. It creates a connection between the viewer and the ‘stars’. In short — the popularity of video content is like a never-ending continuous explosion.

Video marketing

Video is still the pinnacle of content marketing. The icing on that cake is live video, for example, behind-the-scenes glimpses of your business, product demos, live Q&As, etc. Live video can also be used for internal communications, such as sales team trainings and employee town halls, and Cisco says it is going to grow 15x over the next 4 years.

YouTube stars

On YouTube many millennials are making millions from creating their own videos. This confirms the voracious appetite for video content among internet users.

Video streaming

Video streaming services are also booming with revenue in the SVoD (Subscription Video on Demand) sector amounting to $20 Billion in 2018 in the USA alone (source: Statistica). And it’s growing fast.

When it comes to SVoD, most people think of Netflix. But, in recent years, Amazon has laid down the gauntlet with its own Prime Instant Video service.

Best of Prime 2018

Amazon’s ‘Best of Prime’ list for 2018 spotlights what consumers shopped for, watched, listened to, read and played in the last year.

As Prime members curled up on the couch with their TV, tablet or smartphone, the top show they watched on Amazon was ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’, which has won eight Emmy Awards.

The two most binged Prime original series worldwide to date include Tom Clancy’s ‘Jack Ryan’ starring John Krasinski and ‘Homecoming’ starring Julia Roberts.

The top three cities worldwide that streamed the most hours of Prime Video per capita include Santa Clara in the U.S., Norderstedt in Germany and Tokai in Japan — it’s truly a global service.

The Amazon list also showed that nine NFL games thus far on Prime Video and Twitch combined to reach 20 million total viewers in over 200 countries and territories and all fifty U.S. states.

Viewers in the U.S., U.K. and India showed an inclination to watch content before work — they streamed more Prime Video than any other country between 7–9 a.m. local time.

Gaming is huge too, with more than 50 million free games worldwide claimed through Twitch Prime, which also offers exclusive in-game content for some of the biggest games in the world like ‘Fortnite’ and ‘League of Legends’.

What else does Amazon do?

In addition to Prime, Amazon provides self-publishing services, distribution, personalised shopping, tablets, a digital media player and voice-control systems. These include Kindle, Fire TV, Alexa and AWS, and allows businesses like Overcast to partner with Amazon and offer their cloud services to loads of other businesses that want to stream content to more niche audiences like employees, people in stores, on billboards or wherever there is a screen.

Size matters

Netflix says 70 percent of its streams end up on connected TVs instead of phones, tablets or PCs. Meanwhile, YouTube has said that its live TV service — which it had pitched as a mobile-first offering — is now generating more than half of its streams on TVs.

Regardless of which device people are watching on, there’s no doubt that the popularity of online video content looks set to continue to flourish.