Amazon wants your TV set.
The company best known for selling books has been aggressively moving into video streaming with a subscription and rental service (that competes with both
Now the company is reportedly taking things one step further. Re/Code is reporting that a new set-top box from Amazon will be revealed next week. The gadget would compete with things like Roku and AppleTV to stream shows from the Internet to your TV. An Amazon box has been rumored for a while and now it looks like it will see the light of day.
At the same time, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is working on free ad-supported video streaming. Previously, streaming video was only available to people who signed up for Amazon Prime (which now costs $99 per year). By offering the streaming for free but with ads, Amazon gets a whole new revenue stream and the chance to pitch its Prime service to people who don't already take advantage of the video and the free shipping.
A free streaming service would go a long way toward encouraging people to buy the Amazon box as opposed to AppleTV or
Right now, from a media perspective, Amazon is viewed as an also-ran to both Apple and Netflix. The Journal says Amazon spent $1 billion last year to acquire and produce original content but the site has yet to produce anything half as buzzy as House of Cards.
But with its own technology and the potential game changer of an ad-supported service, Amazon becomes much more of a player.
While television is full of ad-supported stations, the Amazon offering could be really appealing. If it's just showing Amazon's original programming with ads inserted, that's not terribly exciting until Amazon comes up with a must-see show. But if the tech company can figure out a way to insert ads (maybe as pre-roll and then half way through a show or movie) into a wide swath of the content it licenses, that would be something. Imagine being able to watch movies like Skyfall and Hunger Games for free with the trade off being a few ads. I think that would get a lot of people to spend the upfront money for the box.
Of course the Wall Street Journal article, which cites unnamed sources, is full of caveats so it could be a while before anything actually happens. We'll learn more next week.
On March 31 an Amazon spokeswoman sent me this comment: “We have a video advertising business that currently offers programs like First Episode Free and ads associated with movie and game trailers, and we’re often experimenting with new things, but we have no plans to offer a free streaming media service.”
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