Everybody makes mistakes, but some mistakes are more serious than others – and when you're running one of the best streaming services, mistakes such as missing episodes, terrible translations and incorrect titles can be a real problem for your subscribers. According to leaked internal documents seen by Business Insider (via Quartz), some of the errors in Prime Video's catalog are so bad that some viewers have been ditching shows entirely.
The documents suggest that at least some of the massive amounts of money Amazon has invested in Prime Video have been undermined by serious catalog errors, and those errors are leading to a very high volume of customer complaints. Some 60% of all content-related customer experience complains last year were about catalog errors, BI reports.
Amazon's on the Prime Video catalog case
The level of complaints is being taken very seriously by Amazon, which is launching a new program with the target of reducing such complaints by 15,000 per year. The top issues complained about were incomplete or inconsistent titling, and what the documents call "season integrity" problems. That's when you're streaming a show only to discover that there are missing episodes, inconsistent playback options or wrongly labeled content. Last year, BI says, Amazon received over 10,000 "customer friction records" related to such issues.
Some of the issues identified in the documents include:
- Making episode 2 of The Rings of Power available before episode 1;
- losing the Spanish audio from Die Hard With A 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 report.
The most likely explanation for this is human error: any classification system with lots of data has the scope for problems, especially if your content is coming from lots of different places and in multiple languages. But while such errors are understandable they can also be expensive: the documents suggest that wrongly localized content could lead to 20% drop-offs in engagement. With the streaming landscape more competitive than ever, Amazon is keen to ensure that the best Prime Video movies and best Prime Videos shows can a) actually be found, and b) are watched all the way through.
