South Africans who subscribe to Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service will be automatically moved onto the company’s new and cheaper Amazon Prime membership, Amazon has confirmed.
Prime Video has until now been sold locally as a standalone service at R79/month. The newly launched Prime bundle, which folds in the same video streaming alongside free delivery, cloud gaming and other perks, costs R59/month, leaving video-only subscribers paying more for less.
Robert Koen, Amazon’s MD for sub-Saharan Africa, told TechCentral in an interview on Wednesday that those customers will be shifted across automatically to Amazon Prime.
“We’re auto-migrating those customers, so at the time of renewal they’ll auto-migrate,” he said. Subscribers can also sign up for Prime immediately and be refunded any balance on their account. Koen described the change as a win for video subscribers, who he said were “getting so much value in this all-in-one package”.
Prime Video has been available in South Africa since 2016, when Amazon switched it on as part of a near-global roll-out. Despite a deep catalogue and keen pricing, it has never achieved the scale of Netflix locally.
Koen pushed back on any suggestion the service has underperformed, saying it has “a very strong and loyal following” in South Africa and a base “growing very rapidly”, though Amazon does not disclose local subscriber numbers.
Timing
The timing is interesting: the move comes just as Canal+ winds down Showmax following its takeover of MultiChoice Group — removing a major commissioner of South African content from the market.
Asked whether Amazon will move into that gap by commissioning more local programming, Koen was non-committal. He pointed to the Siya Kolisi documentary Rise as existing local content but would not be drawn on plans.
Read: Amazon’s long game in South Africa
The launch of Prime in South Africa also pitches Amazon into a second local contest: cloud gaming. Prime members get the standard tier of Amazon Luna, the company’s cloud gaming service, at no extra cost, with access to titles such as Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones, plus a base-level Twitch subscription.
Luna, which runs on Amazon’s AWS cloud, competes against Nvidia’s GeForce Now — the streaming gaming service Rain launched in South Africa in December 2023. By folding Luna into a R59 Prime subscription, Amazon is effectively giving cloud gaming away, undercutting a standalone rival.
Game streaming demands low-latency, high-bandwidth links, which is why Rain hosts GeForce Now locally. Asked whether Amazon has deployed local infrastructure to support Luna, Koen would not discuss specifics.
“The team has deployed what we believe is the right infrastructure to support customers,” he said, adding that Amazon will reassess “based on demand that we see within the country”.
Amazon runs an AWS data centre region in Cape Town that could, in principle, host Luna locally — but Koen did not confirm that it does. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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