Supply Chain Updates, February 2025

Prime Video offers all our content partners its Preferred Vendor Services (PVS), an exclusive and curated service provider program. PVS creates a global community of Prime Video’s highest-performing third-party media vendors to optimize the creation and delivery of assets on behalf of global content partners.

Our Preferred Vendors are subject to an extensive and continuous evaluation of operational excellence. We assess them against our program KPIs to ensure that they can adhere to the Prime Video specifications, requirements, and quality standards. PVS manages the following services to help content partners unlock perfect delivery at scale:

• Preferred Fulfillment Vendors (PFVs) are elite service providers that excel in streamlining asset deliveries for content partners to Prime Video. Our full list of PFVs can be found on the Preferred Fulfillment Vendor service page in Slate.
• Preferred Localization Vendors (PLVs) are best-in-class global language service providers (LSPs) creating high-quality subtitles and audio dubbing, enabling Prime Video to reach global audiences in their language of choice. Our full list of PLVs can be found on our Preferred Localization Vendor service page.
• Preferred Technology Vendors (PTVs) specialize in providing custom technology solutions tailored to meet Prime Video’s specific requirements. By leveraging PTV solutions, stakeholders in the content delivery pipeline can streamline their processes, enhance quality control, and ensure seamless integration with Prime Video’s ecosystem. Our full list of PLVs can be found on our Preferred Technology Vendor services page.

We’ve expanded the support docs to better explain the business reporting offered by Prime Video Channels. The reports available through Prime Video Slate are now thoroughly described in Prime Video reporting for Channels partners.
There are 3 different levels of reporting:

• Channels or Contractual (available to all)
• Premium (only available in the US and dependent on your licensing agreement with Amazon)
• Daily Anonymized reports (available globally, at the customer level with an encrypted customer ID)

The new page defines every attribute for 9 different report types. It also provides metrics you can use to build your own calculations using the reported data.

We’ve expanded the available status messages on the Assets tab in Catalog Manager, so that Prime Video can recommend actions to partners that should enhance customers’ experience of your content. The Action Needed column now includes an Action recommended status. The Required column now features two “recommended” statuses that indicate whether you can take advantage of fixing or delivering particular assets to improve the customer experience. For complete details, see the Key columns and values section of Catalog Manager: Assets tab.

In bulk file delivery, language holdbacks and allowed languages are used to indicate to Prime Video whether a language asset (timed text or audio) for a specified title is accessible in a given territory. This information is submitted in the EMA Avail. If no AllowedLanguage audio is delivered, it creates an error on the storefront for customers.

As of December 2024, Prime Video allows partners improved visibility into language holdback defects in the Avails tab as part of Catalog Manager in Slate. If none of the AllowedLanguage audio from the EMA avail has been delivered, the publishing requirements will show as failed, with the status “All available languages held back”. To ensure the title publishes, please update the AllowedLanguage in the EMA file or deliver an AllowedLanguage audio file.

If you’re reading this in the Slate support docs, welcome! We’re in the process of transitioning the monthly Supply Chain updates from an email newsletter to a page that lives directly in the online support documentation. Driving our communications through Slate itself is an improvement in multiple ways:

• We can make these updates available to every partner who uses Slate, and every internal stakeholder, without having to rely on a constantly-changing distribution list of only those partners who’ve opted in with an email address.
• We can localize the monthly updates in the same 6 languages we provide for all other content.
• We can preserve and manage an archive of monthly updates, and make all the previous versions available to users. No partners need to worry if they’ve inadvertently deleted or didn’t receive a newsletter email.

For February 2025, we’re duplicating the same information in the usual newsletter email, and on the support page linked above. Depending on how partners respond, we’ll continue phasing out the email version in March. But never fear—the updates will still continue on a monthly cadence, and will appear as links on the What’s New page in Slate each month.