Amazon Channels takes 67% of US specialty gross adds, and with subscription pricing closed and advertising heading toward 54% of subscription revenue, the weight of a contract moves from commission to ad inventory
Seven in ten new subscriptions to specialty streaming services in the United States go through Amazon. In Antenna's Q2 2026 figures, Amazon Channels accounted for 67% of Specialty SVOD gross adds by route, against 13% for The Roku Channel and 8% for iTunes. The gap over second place is 54 points — more than double the 26-point margin by which Amazon leads Shopify in US e-commerce.
Prime Video has changed character. It has moved from a service selling its own originals to a shelf that sells other companies' services, and Prime Video Channels is the mechanism. Eleven years after launching in 2015 as the Streaming Partners Program, it has become close to the single distribution route for US specialty streaming.
The take follows retail grammar. Amazon keeps 15% to 30% of subscription revenue for the first twelve months depending on the partner, and takes a share of the advertising time the service sells. Applied to the $7.99 a month KOCOWA+ charges, what remains to the operator is $5.59 to $6.79 per subscription over the first year. A service running an ad tier gives up a further share of inventory from there.
Those paying the toll have their own arithmetic. Services with thin marketing budgets — BritBox, Acorn TV — attach to a subscriber base of a scale they could not otherwise reach, and one with low churn. An adjacency effect follows: about 20% of customers who sign up to one service through Channels buy a second within six months. Being on the shelf itself generates cross-selling. Puck's Julia Alexander wrote on 19 August that Amazon is running the same play in streaming that it runs in e-commerce — laying out services the way it lays out products.