Amazon disclosed this weekend that they would be entering the video download space in mid August. AdAge reported on Saturday that Amazon Digital Video will be a subscription service operating through a desktop client. The company has already cried uncle on music downloads and will focus instead on video, a milieu it believes is still free of domination by a single vendor. ABC/Disney appears to be outside the new project, partnering instead with iTunes. The Amazon service will apparently offer both TV episodes and movies, both download to own and rentals may be included.
Amazon already has a variety of film related properties online, it owns the Internet Movie Database and offers a Netflix style DVD rental service in the UK and Germany, for example.
If anyone can pull off a DRM laden, desktop client driven video download service on a massive scale it’s probably Amazon. The brand’s mindshare in all things e-commerce is massive.
I do wonder though, whether getting video online is a practice that will remain most common among the young and hip for some time. That demographic may be more interested in exploring use of non-traditional vendors than older customers might. They are also probably more willing to just grab videos from illicit P2P networks. All of these vendors, including Amazon, are going to have to come up with something awfully compelling (carrot or stick) to get the kind of business in this medium that they seek.
It will be interesting to watch the Amazon launch next month and see if they can bring anything other than largess to the game.
Just an interesting tidbit… My mom has been watching her soap opera’s online. Don’t know where she gets them or how she found them, but I wouldn’t consider her to be the “hip” crowd – she has no clue what Flickr and YouTube are, and she’s unfamiliar with TechCrunch
That is the point, good services will make the user experience friendly even for the old grandma out there.
Mum isn’t going to be happy about that “old grandma” remark, heh…
That’s pretty interesting Robert, my Mother-in-law has no tech savvy either at all, but she is on the ‘net all the time and she had to upgrade back to dsl again because dial up wasn’t cutting it even for her! Times are changing… I mention that because she may be watching her Soaps online as we speak.. you never know. LOL
My mother, a 63 year old literature professor in Taipei, called using Skype last week to ask if I’ve tried buying groceries on Amazon. She doesn’t watch TV programs online yet, but maybe Amazon will change that.
If the Software does-not-suck and they manage to offer a good quality for a convenient price, they will have a good chance.
If we’re all talking about moms…mine is on email, skype and IM. There is no way on Earth she’ll ever watch the news, a movie or her soap operas in anything other than a TV screen. I have to believe she’s representative of the mainstream Internet population: until the TV programming is back on the TV, they won’t really care – regardless of whether they’re getting it over the air or over the Internet.