What Streams Most at Amazon? The Bodyguard, Amazon Studios Originals and Other Video You Can't Find Elsewhere

Amazon's twelve most popular movies on Prime Instant Videos include five test movies from its Amazon Studios program, Whitney Houston's film debut The Bodyguard, both dubbed and subtitled versions of the original Swedish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny vehicle Space Jam and more.

It's all over the map, figuratively and literally. What do these films have in common? They're not available for streaming anywhere but Amazon Prime.

Amazon's streaming rights to the The Bodyguard – by far the most-watched film this month on Prime – turned into an accidental coup after the singer's death on Feb. 11. Netflix's rights to stream The Bodyguard lapsed at the end of 2011, but rumors flew that the film's production company had pulled the movie to better profit from renewed postmortem interest in Houston.

DigitalTrends' Andrew Couts debunked this conspiracy theory with help from Netflix VP Steve Swasey. But curious customers who still couldn't find The Bodyguard on Netflix found it at Amazon instead.

Only two of the top 12 Prime Instant Videos are available on Netflix; none are available on Hulu. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is only available with English subtitles on Netflix. Amazon offers that as well, but the English-dubbed version is more popular, fifth overall.

This is mixed news for Amazon. On the one hand, clearly Prime Instant Video customers are getting content from the service that they aren't finding anywhere else. On the other, the traffic is almost all driven by accidental events – Houston's death, Amazon Studios' recent test movie awards, even the U.S. release of David Fincher's Oscar-nominated English-native take on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The other "Amazon exclusives" in the top 12 – Space Jam, Foolproof, A Walk to Remember – are older titles that aren't exactly tentpole attractions.

It's also a random grab bag. The list of top 12 television shows on Prime Instant is dominated by nonexclusive kids' programming, with a few outliers like Downton Abbey and Jersey Shore.

At The Atlantic, Alyssa Rosenberg writes that this lack of a coherent personality is common to digital streaming services, even for its individual original series:

Over time, most television networks settle on what kind of programming fits their brand: NBC's known for its quirky comedies, CBS for its bland, broadly appealing sitcoms and cop dramas, ABC is full of soap suds, while HBO goes dark and Showtime goes abrasive... [I]f Battleground and Lillyhammer are any indication, both [Netflix and Hulu are] pulling elements from many different kinds of shows together rather than aiming for a single demographic around which they can build an audience. It's one thing to get people to come to your site because you get them access to everything from Sons of Anarchy to Dora The Explorer. But you're probably not going to get all of your subscribers, or even a large number of them, to tune in to any given show. The sooner the people who deliver content recognize that, the better their original content projects will be.

For movies at least, Amazon Prime is still a second choice (at best) for most streaming customers. As the company's team gathers more data, they need to either continue to ratchet up their catalog parity, or figure out who their customer really is, and better target programming for that audience. In fact, Amazon probably needs to do both.