Do you feel like Prime Video is missing episodes or language options? You’re not alone – and Amazon plans to fix the problem
Everyone makes mistakes, but some mistakes are more serious than others – and if you use one of the top streaming services, mistakes like missing episodes, terrible translations, and incorrect titles can be a real problem for your subscribers. This is evident from leaked internal documents Business insider (through Quartz), some errors in Prime Video’s catalog are so bad that some viewers have ditched shows entirely.
The documents suggest that at least some of the enormous sums Amazon has invested in Prime Video have been undermined by serious catalog errors, and those errors are leading to a very large number of customer complaints. About 60% of all substantive customer experience complaints last year were about catalog errors, BI reports.
Amazon is in the Prime Video catalog business
The number of complaints is being taken very seriously by Amazon, which is launching a new program with the aim of reducing the number of such complaints by 15,000 per year. The main issues complained about were incomplete or inconsistent titles, and what the documents call “season integrity issues.” That’s when you stream a show and discover there are missing episodes, inconsistent playback options, or mislabeled content. Last year, BI says, Amazon received more than 10,000 “customer friction records” related to such issues.
Some of the issues mentioned in the documents include:
- Making episode 2 of The rings of power available before episode 1;
- losing the Spanish audio from Die hard with vengeance;
- translation errors in character names;
- incorrect age restrictions in some shows such as Continuum
And many customers took their complaints to other places, such as forums and Reddit. It’s likely that many such customers didn’t complain directly to Amazon, so the number of errors could be higher than the leaked documents indicate.
The most likely explanation for this is human error: any classification system with a lot of data can cause problems, especially if your content comes from many different places and in multiple languages. But while such mistakes are understandable, they can also be costly: the documents suggest that mislocalized content could lead to a 20% drop in engagement. With the streaming landscape more competitive than ever, Amazon wants to make sure the best Prime Video movies and best Prime Videos shows can be a) actually found and b) watched in full.