Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video
Hundreds of employees at Amazon’s streaming and film subsidiaries Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Twitch are being shown the door in the streaming wars’ latest mass layoff, and Amazon’s first of the New Year. The livestreamer Twitch posted a blog saying it would cut its head count by “just over 500” staffers — more than a third of Twitch’s total staff — while Amazon confirmed to Vulture that “several hundred” would lose their jobs at Prime Video and MGM Studios.
The cutbacks come as anything but surprising in an industry marred by layoffs and consolidation. After buying MGM in 2022, Amazon cut 27,000 jobs in 2023, and it wasn’t alone. The entertainment industry cut 44,000 jobs between May and October 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; Warner Bros. Discovery announced its latest round of layoffs just last month, while Disney axed 7,000 jobs in 2023. For years, analysts and industry types saw the retail giant as a different type of entertainment company, one that could throw $715 million at a Lord of the Rings show and not blink. The latest round of cuts underscores how flawed that thinking was and that there are likely more cuts on the horizon.