Amazon fires hundreds of Prime Video employees

The Big Tech layoffs are not over yet. After a difficult 2023, where the haemorrhaging of jobs was significant, this 2024 begins with a move by Amazon, which is laying off hundreds of employees in its Prime Video and studios division in these hours.

Mike Hopkins, who heads the streaming video and studios division, which includes the MGM unit acquired by the company last year, announced the cuts in an email sent to employees, in which he wrote: "Over the past year, we have reviewed nearly every aspect of our business with the goal of improving our ability to deliver even more innovative movies, television programming and live sports to our global customers in an easy-to-use, personalised entertainment experience. As a result, we have identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas, and instead increase investments and focus on content and product initiatives that have the greatest impact."

Between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, Amazon made rolling redundancies totalling more than 27,000 employees, with CEO Andy Jassy seeking to reduce costs after the rapid expansion during the pandemic, including eliminating several projects conceived during the Jeff Bezos era.

Previous redundancies have mainly affected the division responsible for the Alexa assistant. Now, however, Prime Video, which is the US giant's streaming service and Netflix's fierce competitor, is being hit.

Still on the video front (although in this case it is live), it had emerged in the last few hours that the livestreaming service Twitch (owned by Amazon) was also preparing to announce cuts to around 35 per cent of its staff, i.e. around 500 workers. These layoffs come amid concerns about Twitch's losses and after several high-level executives left the company.