What Formats Are Included in Premium Video Advertising? Prime Video Ads Explained

The formats at a glance

Premium video here means ad-supported streaming inventory, where the ad sits inside or beside professionally produced shows and films rather than in a social feed. On Prime Video, Amazon sells four formats:

• Full-screen video: a non-skippable ad that plays before, during or after content.
• Pause ads: a static creative shown when a viewer pauses.
• Interactive video and interactive pause ads: the same units with a layer that lets a viewer add to cart, request information or send details to a phone.
• Dynamic TV Creative: introduced in 2026, it personalizes the interactive elements of an ad per household.

The table below sets them side by side. Availability of the interactive units depends on market and campaign type, so confirm in your console before planning around them.

The core format: full-screen non-skippable video

The base unit is a full-screen video ad that plays before, during or after Prime Video content and cannot be skipped. In the US and Canada it comes in 15, 30, 45 or 60-second lengths; most European markets instead offer 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 or 60 seconds.

Streaming TV creative specs for Prime Video video ads, per Amazon's ad specs page:

• Frame: minimum 1920×1080 at 16:9
• Video bitrate: 15 Mbps minimum (Amazon recommends 50 Mbps)
• Audio: 192 kbps minimum, AAC
• Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 video
• File size: 500MB maximum

Your logo and brand name are required to appear inside the video itself. Prime Video's ad experience does not layer a clickable brand banner over the creative the way some in-feed video formats do.

Pause ads and interactive formats

Pause ads appear when a viewer pauses their content. The creative is a static image, 1920×1080px, JPEG or PNG, capped at 2MB. It is a lower-friction placement than the full-screen video unit, shown at a moment the viewer has already chosen to stop watching rather than interrupted mid-content.

Interactive Video Ads and interactive pause ads let a viewer add a product to cart, request information, or send details to their phone without leaving what they're watching, in eligible markets and campaign types. Amazon's own reporting on these interactive formats shows higher engagement than static equivalents: 6x higher brand searches, 4x higher product page views, 4x higher add-to-cart actions and 5x higher purchase rates compared with standard streaming TV campaigns carrying the same objective. Dynamic TV Creative personalizes eligible interactive elements using Amazon's shopping, browsing and streaming data, so two households can see the same base ad with different interactive elements.

Targeting options on premium video placements

Premium video is not sold as run-of-site inventory only. Through Amazon DSP, streaming campaigns can be targeted using Amazon's own audience signals, built from shopping, browsing and streaming activity, instead of buying the show alone. In practice a plan can combine three layers:

• Audience: reach shoppers by what they have browsed or bought, or by interests and life events Amazon infers.
• Content and supply: choose Prime Video specifically, or let the campaign run across the wider streaming pool that includes Fire TV Channels, Twitch and third-party publishers.
• Your own audiences: bring first-party lists, such as past customers, to reach or suppress them.

The exact options change as Amazon updates the DSP, so treat this as a map of the layers and check the targeting menu in your console for what is live today. Dynamic TV Creative adds a fourth layer on the creative side: the ad itself adapts per household.

What it costs, and what the minimums are

Amazon does not publish a fixed CPM or rate card for Prime Video. Pricing is set in an auction, so any CPM quoted to you is a snapshot of that moment. What Amazon does publish is the spend structure: no minimum for self-serve Sponsored Ads formats, a recommended $10,000 minimum per campaign for self-serve Amazon DSP, and a required $50,000 minimum for managed-service DSP campaigns.

Because there is no rate card, ask whoever is buying for you to report the actual CPM and completion rate by format, so you can see whether pause and interactive units are pulling their weight against full-screen video.

A worked example

This is an arithmetic illustration, not a quote or a result. Take a $20,000 monthly Prime Video budget and assume a $30 CPM. That buys roughly 667,000 impressions ($20,000 ÷ $30 × 1,000) before frequency capping trims delivery to unique households. It clears the $10,000 self-serve recommendation, and it leaves room to split the budget across formats and read completion rate and branded search movement with confidence.

For a sense of what streaming TV can do alongside other video: in Amazon's own published case study, kitchen-appliance brand Fellow ran streaming TV, including Prime Video's ad-supported inventory, alongside its existing online video and saw a 500% lift in branded search, with 90% of streaming-TV-influenced purchasers new to the brand, a 75% higher new-to-brand rate than online video alone produced.

What to do when it goes wrong, and the common mistakes

If delivery is thin against a $20,000+ budget, check bid competitiveness before targeting. Prime Video is contested inventory, and an under-market bid loses the auction quietly. If interactive formats aren't showing the lift Amazon's reporting suggests, confirm eligibility: a standard video buy substituted where an interactive one was intended won't produce interactive-format numbers. If sales don't move in the same week as a flight, that is normal for non-clickable, top-of-funnel inventory; the honest read comes from Amazon Marketing Cloud and branded search. If a video file is rejected, check bitrate and frame size first: the 15 Mbps floor is higher than most other DSP video placements require.

The most common mistake is running only the default full-screen video because it is the first option in the console, and skipping pause and interactive formats. The second is building one 30-second cut and running it unchanged everywhere. A pause ad has to work as a single still frame, and an interactive unit needs one clear call to action. reMKTR (remktr.com) runs Amazon DSP as a service and tests pause and interactive formats alongside standard video from the first month of a Prime Video buy, because the format mix, not just the budget, shapes the result.