In-home ethnography with 30 families in the US, Germany and Japan for Amazon Prime Video

Amazon Prime Video could see viewing hours, completion rates and platform switching across its global user base, but not the context: why a thirteen-year-old in Tokyo opens YouTube instead of Prime Video after school, what happens on the sofa when a family in Minneapolis sits down for a film, how a German teenager discovers new content and what part friends, algorithms and cultural moments play. The brief was to understand the full entertainment journey of teenagers, from discovery to sharing, and how parents experience the same landscape, across three culturally distinct markets.

MindMarket designed a multi-market in-home ethnographic study in Minneapolis, Berlin and Tokyo, recruiting ten families per market, thirty households in all, with visits conducted simultaneously across the three countries. Each session paired two interviews in the same home: a sixty-minute conversation with the teenager and a thirty-minute conversation with a parent, because what teenagers think they do and what parents observe often tell different stories. The research covered the entertainment journey from discovery to post-viewing behaviour, device ecosystems and screen switching, the role of social platforms, family dynamics around screens, and the cultural specifics of each market. Local researchers ran the visits in each language; one team coordinated the three markets and delivered a single cross-market synthesis.

The study showed what dashboards could not: how discovery happens through friends and social feeds before any platform is opened, how devices are switched mid-session, where Prime Video sits in a teenager's day in each country, and where parents' view of screen time diverges from what their children do. Amazon Prime Video received one coordinated picture across the United States, Germany and Japan, with the differences between markets explained rather than averaged away, to inform how content, discovery and family features are designed for younger audiences.