It is probably fair to say that for many Irish households during lockdown, a subscription to one of the streaming platforms available in Ireland was just as important as a regular supply of hand sanitizers and facemasks.

At a time when cinemas, theatres, live-music venues and pubs were closed, a subscription to one or several of the OTT platforms like Netflix, Apple TV +, Amazon Prime, Disney + or NOW was a must-have in many households.

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, the marketing and communications group Core estimated that as much as 66pc of the population had tried at least one video-on-demand (VOD) service while an estimated 63pc of the population had access to Netflix.

While much of the world was battling with Covid-19, a battle of a different kind was being waged by some of the biggest global media, tech and telecommunications companies as they bid for the eyeballs of billions of people around the world with their on-demand entertainment offerings,

Netflix is the leading player in terms of the depth and breadth of its catalogue and the 195m subscribers it has globally, including close to a million in Ireland. Disney +, meanwhile, has 100m subscribers globally while Apple TV + has an estimated 33.6m. But all eyes in the media and entertainment world are now fixed on Amazon and what it does next in its bid for global dominance.

In his outgoing letter as CEO of Amazon in mid-April, founder Jeff Bezos told shareholders that Amazon’s Prime membership stood at a staggering 200m people worldwide. This was up from 150m at the beginning of 2020. Prime membership is important to Amazon and in 2020 it accounted for a staggering $25.2bn (€20.7bn) or approximately 6.5pc of its total revenues of $386.06bn. Bezos also revealed for the first time that of the 200m Prime subscribers, 175m had tuned into Prime Video over the past 12 months.

Given the paucity of its catalogue, however, not many analysts had taken Amazon Prime too seriously in the past. Bezos’ recent comments about its membership and the recent news that Amazon is to acquire MGM has changed all that.

Two weeks ago, Amazon announced that it is to splash $8.45bn on acquiring MGM, the second largest deal the company has done since its $13.4bn acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017. The deal will give it access to 4,000 movies and 17,000 hours of TV, including the James Bond and Rocky franchises as well as content as diverse as The Pink Panther, The Handmaid’s Tale, Shark Tank and Vikings.

In one fell swoop, Amazon has moved from an “also-ran” to a serious contender to Netflix and Disney. But Amazon’s ambitions in the entertainment space go beyond VOD. In the sporting arena it has live-streaming agreements in place with the NFL in the US and the Premier League in England. In rugby, it also streamed the Nations Cup tournament that took place in 2020 and it is now being touted as a possible buyer of BT Sport.

Amazon’s MGM acquisition comes against a convoluted background of consolidation in Hollywood and the wider entertainment and media industry,  as some of the key players scramble to build their content libraries to compete with Netflix and Disney and, ultimately, bypass traditional TV networks by going direct to consumers where, as Amazon has shown with Prime, there are rich pickings.

Just two weeks before the MGM deal was announced, for example,  AT&T spun out its media business WarnerMedia and merged it with TV company Discovery. On a revenue basis, the deal created the second largest media company in the world with revenues in excess of $41bn.  

In recent years, Disney bought most of the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox while Comcast acquired Sky and elsewhere Comcast, which owns Xfinity in the US, bought Rupert Murdoch’s Sky which in turn owns the popular NOW platform. Outplayed by Disney in a bidding war for 21st Century Fox in 2018, Comcast might be another one to watch over the coming year.

But with its deep pockets, enormous ambition to reshape the retailing, logistics and entertainment world, don’t be surprised to see Amazon come out on top within the next few years.