By Michelle Chapman
Amazon is cutting several hundred positions across its Prime Video and MGM Studios unit.
Last month Amazon said that Prime Video users would start seeing ads on movies and television shows starting on January 29, setting a date for an announcement it made back in September.
Prime members who want to keep their movies and TV shows ad-free will have to pay an additional $2.99 per month.
Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a note to employees that the company is boosting investment in areas with the most impact, while stepping back from others.
Amazon has cut thousands of jobs after a hiring surge during the pandemic. In March, Amazon announced that it planned to lay off 9,000 employees. That was on top of the 18,000 employees the tech giant said that it would lay off in January 2023.
Job cuts are occurring elsewhere in the company this week.
Twitch, the video game streaming platform acquired by Amazon a decade ago for close to $1 billion, is laying off more than 500 employees as the company tries to turn the tremendously expensive division profitable.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy in an email to employees said that even with cost cuts and growing efficiency, the platform "is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business."
"For some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we're at today," Clancy wrote.
Departing employees at Amazon Prime will receive a separation payment and other benefits like job placement support.
In May Amazon said that it would distribute its original films and TV shows, like "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," to media outlets outside its Prime Video service for the first time.
That content would be licensed via a new unit called Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, which expands the number of titles currently offered by Hollywood studio MGM. In 2022, the e-commerce-behemoth-turned-media-giant closed its acquisition of MGM — which houses more than 4,000 film titles and 17,000 TV episodes — for $8.5 billion.
Michelle Chapman is an AP business writer
Local school staple “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” from 1939 hits the big screen nationwide
Most Maine schoolchildren know about the boy lost for more than a week in 1939 after climbing the state's tallest mountain. Now the rest of the U.S. is getting in on the story.
Opening in 650 movie theaters on Friday, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" tells the harrowing tale of 12-year-old Donn Fendler, who spent nine days on Mount Katahdin and the surrounding wilderness before being rescued. The gripping story of survival commanded the nation's attention in the days before World War II and the boy's grit earned an award from the president.
For decades, Fendler and Joseph B. Egan's book, published the same year as the rescue, has been required reading in many Maine classrooms, like third-grade teacher Kimberly Nielsen's.
"I love that the overarching theme is that Donn never gave up. He just never quits. He goes and goes," said Nielsen, a teacher at Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, who also read the book multiple times with her own kids.
Separated from his hiking group in bad weather atop Mount Katahdin, Fendler used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive. He made his way through the woods to the east branch of the Penobscot River, where he was found more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where he started. Bruised and cut, starved and without pants or shoes, he survived nine days by eating berries and lost 15 pounds (7 kilograms).
The boy's peril sparked a massive search and was the focus of newspaper headlines and nightly radio broadcasts. Hundreds of volunteers streamed into the region to help.
The movie builds on the children's book, as told by Fendler to Egan, by drawing upon additional interviews and archival footage to reinforce the importance of family, faith and community during difficult times,... Read More