Amazon Working on New TV and Movie Streaming Service
Any way you slice it, companies that are already in the online video business are looking to get deeper in. Reports indicate that Amazon is working to expand their video offerings to include TV and movies from the likes of NBC, Time Warner, and Viacom. The new service would likely be viewable on devices Amazon currently uses for video. Devices like the Roku, Xbox 360, and PC would all fall into this category.
Amazon currently charges $1.99 for many individual TV episodes. The new streaming service would probably be a subscription affair, or would offer cheaper prices. Amazon may provide free subscriptions to current Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 per year for unlimited 2-day shipping on purchases.
As usual, the viability of this strategy is reliant on content creators signing on. No word on that yet, but Amazon will want to hurry if the Apple rumors about $0.99 streaming rentals on iTunes are real.

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Walnut
August 31, 2010 at 7:57pm
With Amazon's catalog, I would likely pay for this. I've currently got a free year of Prime through the student program (which anyone with a .edu address should check out, by the way) and would definitely buy another year if they can come up with a decent streaming catalog. Would have to be better than Netflix, though that isn't a terribly tall order at this point.
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I Jedi
August 31, 2010 at 3:52pm
Finally, we begin to see other big companies mature their operations into the market of online video streaming. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that a lot of these tech. giants are all trying to make it big at this market at the same time. Not only will it translate into a very reduced price for the end-consumer, but will also pump-out quality entertainment and usability. We should also be thankful that these tech. giants are doing this at the same time because it is a lot better than having one, big name controlling most of the online video streaming. For now, though, Netflix and iTunes are thee best way to get cheap, good/average quality entertainment.














