Amazon shutters its Anime Strike streaming service, launched in Jan. 2017 for $5/month for US Prime members, moves Anime Strike's curated catalog to Prime Video
After just a year, Amazon has gutted its hard-to-love anime service Anime Strike, rolling the dozens of anime shows …
Context & Ripple Effects
Anime Strike was Amazon's first branded VOD subscription service, launched in January 2017 with over 1,000 titles as a paid add-on on top of Prime (its rollout). A year later it is gone as a separate product, with the curated catalog folded into Prime Video itself.
The move fits a pattern in Amazon's own history: back in 2015 it made live streaming available to Prime members in Japan at no additional fee (the Japan offering), and more recently it shut down Freevee and moved that content into Prime Video too (the Freevee wind-down). Niche services keep getting absorbed into the core membership.
First-order effects
- US Prime members who were paying the extra monthly fee for Anime Strike now get its dozens of curated shows through Prime Video without the add-on charge.
- Amazon retires its first branded VOD subscription tier, ending the experiment of charging Prime members twice for anime.
Second-order effects
- The Freevee precedent shows where this leads: any Amazon streaming property that cannot stand alone gets consolidated into Prime Video, concentrating viewership and negotiating leverage in one service.
- Niche genre channels competing for the same audience lose the cover of Amazon's paid-tier pricing, since comparable catalogs are now effectively bundled into a membership buyers already hold.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Japan's no-extra-fee streaming, then Anime Strike, then Freevee — Amazon stops treating vertical streaming brands as standalone revenue lines and treats their catalogs as Prime retention features, pushing the industry further toward mega-bundles over niche subscriptions.
The trend: Amazon is systematically dissolving standalone streaming brands into Prime Video, converting niche catalogs from separate fees into Prime membership perks.