“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.]