Support

Our Content Acquisition Manager will ask you to complete a questionnaire to collect some basic information about your business. After your questionnaire is returned, we'll prepare your partner alias, Aspera account, and Video Central account. You'll also be invited to VOD delivery training. After training completion, you will be allowed to continue launch title deliveries.

Our onboarding preparation takes about 10 days and partner training lasts up to 30 days depending on your engagement and responsiveness to our feedback. After training completion, title publishing requires 14 days to complete at maximum. For more information, see Service Level Agreements (SLAs). If your content must be published earlier than these timelines (e.g., within 40 days), a posthouse must be used that has already been onboarded for Prime Video delivery. Upon request, we can provide a list of available options.

Note: The Prime Video Channels onboarding process requires additional lead time for launch title delivery and pre-publishing QA testing. Your Partner Launch Manager (PLM) will provide your with an onboarding timeline.

Questionnaire

Our Content Acquisition Manager will ask you to complete a questionnaire to collect some basic information about your business. The questionnaire enables us to create your partner accounts, Aspera delivery account, and Video Central account, which are essential elements allowing you to access the Video Central portal. The questionnaire also prepares your Partner Integrations Manager (PIM) to customize the onboarding training to your needs (i.e. Technical Asset Review, Avails review, and/or Phased avails and asset package review).

Partner setup

After you complete your questionnaire, Prime Video will prepare a partner alias, Aspera account, and your Video Central setup.

• Partner alias
  This is a partner ID assigned to each content rights holder. The partner alias ID corresponds to your Display Name in the Content rights sheet (avails). This field is used to specify the content rights owner on each title and must be used in metadata and asset manifests to match asset packages to content distribution rights. In all instances, the structure of our partner alias is lower-case lettering and a one-word string.
• Aspera account
  Prime Video prepares your Aspera account to accept avails and asset package components uploads (metadata, manifest, video, timed-text, etc.). Aspera allows you to upload files in high velocity and securely. We set up these accounts and delivery allowlisting based on the information provided in the Prime Video VOD Delivery Operation Questionnaire. All files uploaded in the Aspera account are deleted after ingested successfully into Prime Video. All delivery records appear in the Video Central portal.
• Video Central
  This is a web portal Prime Video provides for content partners. In the VOD delivery onboarding, we enable partners to see delivery validation results and tracking in Deliveries, Title requests, Delivery report, and Notifications.

Partner training

Partner training can cover multiple areas. Depending on your situation, one or more of below trainings will be performed:

• Technical Asset Review
  This process evaluates whether the video files you deliver to Prime Video meet our specifications and quality bar. This process applies to content partners (studio/posthouse) who have never delivered to any Prime Video region. As the technical video spec (editorial guideline, acceptable codec, bitrate) is the same across regions, you aren't required to pass this test if you've already onboarded to any of the Prime Video regions.
• Phased avails and asset package review
  This process familiarizes you with steady-state delivery operations and establishes the efficient digital supply of content (avails, metadata, artwork, video, localization assets) in spec for a target region. This process applies to content partners (studio/posthouse) who are new to delivering title packages for a target region. If you need to deliver avails (for TVOD, Channels, SVOD CPH content rights delivery purposes), Avails review is also included.
• Avails review
  This process evaluates whether you're able to deliver Content rights sheet avails to the target business deal (TVOD, Channels, SVOD CPH). This process applies to content partners (studio/posthouse) who are already have onboarded to package delivery, but are new to avails delivery.

If you or your posthouse is already onboarded to Prime Video delivery, partner training can be skipped. Please provide your delivery information in your questionnaire. The partner training phase normally starts from when your Partner Integrations Manager (PIM) confirms your completion of partner alias, Aspera account, and Video Central setup.

Launch title delivery and title publishing

After your Partner Integrations Manager (PIM) confirms your delivery capability in the partner training stage, you're allowed to deliver remaining title deliveries toward content publishing. Account management from the Prime Video content operation team is handed over from PIM to a Partner Operation Manager (POM). Regardless of POM assignment, you're expected to operate avails and/or asset package delivery and handle redeliveries against Video Central delivery results in self-serve nature, along with delivery SLA.

Your cooperation

We know your time is valuable. Prime Video allocates a maximum of 30 days to train you on Prime Video onboarding. During this process, we require all deliveries and redeliveries to be received by us no later than 48 hours after we issue a delivery request or re-request. This includes Avails review, Technical Asset Review, and/or Phased avails and asset package review. These SLAs match steady-state expectations to maintain the high standards we have for Prime Video support. Your Partner Integrations Manager (PIM) is committed to complete this process as quickly as possible and we require your engagement to ensure swift completion of your training. This ensures we meet on time publishing timelines for our customers and provide them with quality viewing experiences they expect.

Any delays during the training phase will result lost time for launch deliveries and might put your launch date at risk. Also, lack of engagement by you has a direct result on the quality of our customer experiences (such as delayed re-deliveries). Therefore, during your training, if we don't receive a response or corrective action from you within three working days, we will issue a warning. After three warnings, we may stop the training, escalate the issue to commercial teams, and/or explore leveraging a posthouse to deliver to Amazon on your behalf.

To prevent this from occurring, we expect you to read the Prime Video delivery requirements to gain a basic understanding of delivery format and processes. Also, we expect that your assets are ready to be uploaded to our Prime Video pipeline to start your validation by the time of our first onboarding contact. We very much hope and expect you will be able to meet our deadlines. However, if you believe you will be unable to do so, please advise your business team contacts as soon as possible so we can try find an alternate solution.

Training completion

When partner training is successfully completed, your Partner Integrations Manager (PIM) sends a summary email message clearly outlining the formats that you're approved to deliver to Prime Video. Your PIM then transitions you to steady-state supply of assets as per agreement.

Posthouse utilization

For the sake of high quality and smooth contents delivery, Prime Video recommends posthouse utilization. More than 50 posthouses are onboarded to Prime Video Global package delivery and ready to operate package delivery on behalf of studio. When you decide using onboarded posthouse, studios can focus on content rights management and only need to go through Avails review process.

Please contact your Content Acquisition Manager (CAM) or any other Prime Video operation team for a list of onboarded posthouses.