“Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is primed and ready for a fresh assault on the streaming-video space,” Claire Atkinson reports for The New York Post. “The e-commerce giant will roll out a new ad-supported streaming offering early next year that will be separate from its $99-a-year Prime membership, which includes a video service, sources said.”
“The ad-supported option — part of an overhaul of its media offerings — poses a serious challenge to streaming rivals such as Hulu and Netflix, analysts said,” Atkinson reports. “‘If they do an ad-supported service, they will decouple it from Prime and that is a Netflix killer,’ Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said. ‘It won’t be $99 a year.'”
“Although it will be separate from Prime, the ad-supported service is ultimately a bid by Amazon to lure people to eventually pay up for Prime membership, said one ad source familiar with Amazon’s plans,” Atkinson reports. “‘The main point is to bring in more users that you can eventually up-sell to Prime, or to get to a broader audience that doesn’t want to pay for Prime, in order to increase their video share,’ the source said.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
You mean, a cable channel.
Remember Cheech and Chong on the railroad track…? If it looks like s–t, and smells like s–t, and tastes like
s–t – it IS s–t!
Amazon has added “benefits” to Prime membership to the point that it is a money loser. Prime pricing is already at the point they can’t raise it without people starting to drop out. I don’t use anything other than the free shipping and probably won’t pay any more.
This offering separates some services from Prime and enables a new revenue stream. Better that driving people out of the online store for the physical goods Amazon want to sell. They’re not going to be able to use physical goods to subsidize digital goods like they have used physical book sales to subsidize e-book sales to establish their monopoly.
I don’t get it–HULU plus already shows ads during it’s streams AND you still have to pay monthly. What’s the difference??
So . . . they are basically creating a traditional television channel. 😛 The more ‘streaming’ evolves, the more it looks like cable TV, and the stagnation it signifies could be applied broadly across technology these days (Uber is just a taxi cab, Air B&B is just a rented room, web series are just crappy TV shows, ‘Lifehacking’ is just self-help etc., etc., ad nauseum). I am seriously failing to see the innovation in much of anything lately, particularly from Amazon. Creativity and genuinely original ideas seem to have skipped a generation.
Amazon does a great job of selling a lot of stuff that other people make. At selling the things that Jeff dreams up, not so much.
The video service bundled with Prime frankly isn’t worth much. If this new service is of lesser quality (so as to encourage “upgrading”), I for one certainly wouldn’t buy any ad time on it.