Sources: as Amazon gets ready to add linear TV channels to IMDb TV, partners push back against its plans to sell all ads with 55% revenue share to publishers
Tim Peterson / Digiday : Tweets: @tvrev Tweets: @tvrev : Inside Amazon's pitch to programmers for IMDb TV: “Amazon's basically saying, 'Here's some money you didn't have yesterday for basically doing nothing,'” said @AWolk, co-founder and lead analyst at consulting firm TVRev. https://digiday.com/... @petersontee
Context & Ripple Effects
This dispute is the next chapter in Amazon's slow build of an ad-funded video arm: after sources flagged a free, ad-supported service for Fire TV's roughly 48M users in mid-2018 and IMDb confirmed the free ad-supported video service that October, a May pitch deck laid out the ambition to build a video advertising business on Fire TV and IMDb FreeDive to rival Roku and Hulu. Adding linear channels is the inventory step; the fight is over who owns the advertising relationship that comes with it.
Amazon's offer — full control of ad sales in exchange for a 55% share to publishers — asks programmers to accept distribution without pricing power, a trade TVRev's Alan Wolk frames as found money for doing little. The pushback matters because the same playbook resurfaces years later when Amazon moves ads into Prime Video itself.
First-order effects
- Programmers considering IMDb TV channel slots must choose between reach on Fire TV devices and surrendering their own sales teams' inventory, pricing, and advertiser data to Amazon for less than 55% effective control.
- Amazon's channel lineup and launch timeline now hinge on closing these deals, since linear channels only arrive if enough publishers accept terms many are publicly resisting.
Second-order effects
- Roku and other FAST platforms face a pricing benchmark: Amazon's 55% publisher split becomes the reference point against which every distributor's revenue-share terms get negotiated.
- If publishers concede ad-sales control here, it strengthens Amazon's hand for the bigger ask that follows — the later talks to carry WBD's and Paramount's ad tiers inside Prime Video Channels ([[a:1154944]]) show the same distributor-first structure scaling up.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward streamers-as-distributors consolidating ad-sales power: content owners supply inventory while platform owners own demand, data, and yield optimization — the direction Amazon doubled down on by expanding Prime Video ads in 2025 ([[a:876601]]) after subscriber churn proved tolerable.
- For TV networks, ceding ad sales across multiple platforms risks reducing them to programming suppliers, with the durable margin migrating to whoever aggregates the audience — a structural shift regulators and industry bodies have yet to test.
The trend: Streaming distribution is consolidating around platforms that sell their own advertising, shifting revenue-share negotiations from equal partnerships toward take-rate economics set by device owners.