What you need to know
- Roku and Amazon have reached a deal to keep Prime Video and IMDb TV on the platform.
- Roku’s primary source of revenue comes from ads, while it also takes a percentage of
- Roku was previously locked in a very public battle with Google over YouTube and YouTube TV.
Roku has announced a new distribution deal that will keep Amazon’s Prime Video and IMDb TV apps on the platform. The announcement arrived quietly on Monday, contrasting a fairly tumultuous battle between Roku and Google.
Roku issued a statement on its website announcing the new deal:
“Roku and Amazon have reached a multi-year extension for their distribution agreement. Customers can continue to access the Prime Video and IMDb TV apps on their Roku devices.”
The deal arrives after a year of very public back and forth between Roku and Google over the terms of the YouTube TV service. The drama between the two companies resulted in YouTube TV being removed from the Roku channel store, then rolled into the regular YouTube app as a workaround while the two companies hashed out a new deal to keep the apps on the platform.
Eventually, they reached a deal just before YouTube was to be removed from the best Roku devices.
Roku makes a sizeable amount of its revenue from ads, taking 30% of advertising inventory from partners, in addition to 20% of gross app transactions from paid apps, per Roku’s distribution agreement. Roku’s platform revenue grew 49% to $703.6 million in its most recent quarterly report. As for Roku’s deal with Amazon, the terms of the agreement were not disclosed, so it’s unclear if Prime Video and IMDb TV are subject to these same terms.
Nonetheless, it means Roku users can continue to access their favorite Prime Video shows, including the upcoming series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” which premieres this September.
