The documents also reveal that Amazon launched an initiative in 2024 to address these issues and avoid many thousands of related customer complaints.

The effort shows how hard it is to maintain a vast and expanding library of diverse content. Last year, Amazon spent almost $19 billion on video, music, and other digital content. In 2021, it acquired MGM and its deep slate of movies and shows for $8.5 billion, the second largest acquisition in company history.

The documents obtained by BI suggest that Amazon may have overlooked the intricate details of its video content pages, even while investing heavily to grow its streaming business. Still, the company runs a vast array of different businesses and must prioritize the most pressing projects to pursue.

“Catalog quality is an ongoing priority,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We take it seriously and work relentlessly alongside our global partners and dedicated internal teams to continuously improve the overall customer experience.”

CEO confidence

In Amazon’s recent annual shareholder letter, CEO Andy Jassy showed his continued support for Prime Video.

“We have increasing conviction that Prime Video can be a large and profitable business on its own,” he wrote.

He highlighted “compelling, exclusive content,” such as Thursday Night Football, Lord of the Rings, Reacher, The Boys, Citadel, and Road House, and noted that Prime Video customers are engaging with these shows.

A “Season Integrity” problem

Despite that, the Prime Video service has been plagued by errors in how content is categorized and described for viewers. For example, 60% of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalog errors, the documents obtained by BI reveal.

Among the top “catalog quality issues” were incomplete or inconsistent titles, as well as a “Season Integrity” problem. This latter issue encompasses defects such as missing episodes, inconsistent playback options, and wrong content availability, the documents stated. Last year, Amazon received almost 10,000 “customer friction records” related to Season Integrity, it added.

“To solve this, we need cross-org investments in 1) Inconsistency detection & alarming, and 2) Global/regional programs on competitor selection monitoring for season products and keep our avails current, consistent and high quality,” one of the documents explained.

A catalog of errors

Prime Video, which is included in Amazon’s Prime subscription package, is the main draw for people signing up for the membership. For years, Prime Video has been one of the largest investment areas for Amazon. Prime Video’s headcount grew faster than any other unit at the company in recent years.

Those efforts, however, appear to have largely failed to address catalog quality issues. Here are some examples cited in the documents:

• The second episode of “The Rings of Power” series was available before the first episode for some viewers when it launched in 2022.

• Some viewers complained about a translation error in character names.

• The action film “Die Hard with a Vengeance” at one point had missing Spanish audio.

• The TV series “Continuum” showed an incorrect age restriction.

Customer complaints

Similar complaints can be found in public online communities, such as Reddit and Amazon’s own online forum.

One person wrote on Amazon’s online forum in 2021 that the Australian TV shows “Blue Heelers” and “Water Rats” had their episode orders mixed up. Two years later, it didn’t appear to have been resolved, as another person complained about a similar issue, even though an Amazon customer service representative had responded to both of their queries.

Multiple posts about wrong movie titles on Prime Video can also be found on Amazon’s forum and Reddit.

These are “extremely sloppy mistakes” that Amazon has not been able to fix for years, one person directly involved in the project told BI. The actual depth of the problem may be bigger, this person added, because Amazon manually reviews only a small portion of its content catalog with an internal group.

Customers also don’t always file complaints about video errors the way they do with physical goods they paid for, even if it’s frustrating, according to this person. They asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak to the press.

A lot of these problems stem from inaccurately labeling the shows, according to Anthony Palomba, a media and entertainment business professor at the University of Virginia. It’s likely Amazon is storing mismatched data structures that are not aligned with the specific shows.

“My best guess is that some of this is likely low-level human error,” Palomba told BI.

‘Incomplete content experience’

Amazon wants to address these issues this year by launching a new program that fixes the “incomplete content experience,” including localization errors and title display mismatches, the documents said. It’s also considering the launch of new internal metrics that report the “completeness” around the full catalog.

For 2024, “automating existing pillars with the tech teams to improve accuracy/precision” and using “abandonment data to drive title completeness” are listed as two of the goals, according to one of the documents.

Viewers abandoning shows

For some shows, the catalog defects are leading to an increase in show abandonment. Content with the wrong localized display page, for example, saw 20% more drop-offs in engagement, one of the documents stated. Amazon discussed using “corrections data” to provide better viewer recommendations and to re-engage “customers post-defect,” it said.

The Prime Video team wants to build new software programs that “proactively identify known customer defects related to inconsistent or incomplete seasons,” one of the documents stated.

The data from these new programs will be shared with partners and operators to further reduce viewer churn, it explained.

Resolving 15,000 customer complaints

Another problem is the quality of content localization, the documents said. That includes “poor linguistic quality of assets,” such as translation errors or incorrect artwork for content display pages.

“There is a general ‘sense’ that our localization is subpar…These are difficult to detect due to lack of in-house expertise” in certain languages, one of the documents said.

To address this, Amazon is looking to launch a new “human-led language expertise program to scale sourcing of language experts for a wide set of languages” and create a program that improves “subjective translation quality,” one of the documents said. This will reduce poor localized content in titles, synopses, and casting, and prevent general spelling and grammar errors.

Ultimately, Amazon estimates these changes will reduce customer complaints by roughly 15,000 per year, it added.

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