- The platform will invest $5 billion in 2018 in audiovisual content alone.
- Netflix already has 2 million homes in Spain, Amazon Video 656,000 and HBO 475,000.
- The big winner of the war of Vodafone and Orange by Amazon Video... is Amazon
Amazon has been working for months on a project to produce series on European soil and has contacted some of the main suppliers on the continent, including some with Spanish capital, as confirmed by EL ESPAÑOL with sources in the sector. The objective is to find a city where to locate its base of audiovisual operations within the continent.
The sources consulted by this newspaper add that in the coming weeks the group will make the final decision, but that Spain has many ballots to become the next hub of Prime Video outside the U.S. in coordination with London, the headquarters on the continent of the platform. EL ESPAÑOL has confirmed that Amazon executives have been talking to Spanish producers for several months and that their objective is to make a move similar to the one Netflix closed in the summer.
In July, the U.S. platform closed a rental agreement for the studios of the Spanish group Secuoya in Tres Cantos to produce twelve series a year on Spanish soil. Netflix will rent the audiovisual city of Madrid, but it has also signed an exclusive technical production agreement with the company chaired by Raúl Berdonés.
656,000 user households in Spain
At the moment, Amazon has 656,000 user households in Spain according to the latest CNMC data and is negotiating agreements with Movistar, Orange and Vodafone to join its television platforms. For the last six months Telefónica has been working on Amazon integrations with Vivo in Brazil, while a few weeks ago Orange announced that it was negotiating with the platform.
24 hours later, Vodafone confirmed that it was also negotiating and this Monday offered its first convergent packages incorporating Amazon Prime, although still without Prime Video in its decoder.
The audiovisual platform also produced in our country Six Dreams, a documentary series about six protagonists of the 2017-2018 season of the Football League, with the collaboration of the Mediapro group. In fact, there was speculation that Amazon would enter the LaLiga rights competition that Telefónica finally won by bidding for a secondary contract to broadcast matches.
5 billion investment this year
At an international level, one of Amazon Prime Video's obsessions is to be able to compete against Netflix and for this it announced an investment in audiovisual content of 5,000 million dollars by 2018, after investing 4,000 million in 2017 in productions such as El hombre del Castillo, The Grand Tour, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Six Dreams, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. For the next few years, this investment is expected to multiply to 8 billion.
A hard fight for audiovisual leadership in which Netflix will invest 8 billion and Facebook another billion. To give us an idea of the magnitudes in Spain, only Atresmedia and Mediaset are approaching these magnitudes with an annual turnover of 1,000 million each, but with much smaller investments in audiovisual production.
Amazon in Spain
If Amazon Prime Video finally arrives to produce series from Spanish soil, Spain could become Europe's largest audiovisual hub. Netflix is building in our country a structure of more than one hundred people, with the aim of producing at least twelve series a year in the facilities of Secuoya. Amazon will not have such ambitious goals in a first stage.
Amazon -without an audiovisual production centre in Spain yet- will double its workforce in Spain to 3,200 people, after investing more than 1,100 million euros in its operations in our country since 2010. The investments have resulted in seven logistics centres: San Fernando de Henares and Getafe, as well as an urban centre in Madrid; El Prat, Castellbisbal, Martorelles and an urban centre in Barcelona; four logistics stations, in addition to a corporate headquarters and the Madrid tech hub, the tech hub and the business support centre in Barcelona.
Credits https://www.elespanol.com/economia/empresas/20181204/amazon-centro-produccion-audiovisual-espana-prime-video/357965307_0.html