Amazon has just announced a large increase in the number of titles available through their Instant Video service, giving customers access to over 100,000 Movies and TV Shows. Amazon Prime members can access over 9,000 of those selections at no extra cost beyond their existing membership fees. While this is of course a good move in general, it works even better with the knowledge of a video-focused Kindle Tablet right around the corner.
There is some fairly good evidence to support the theory that Amazon is getting ready to try to do with video what they already accomplished in eBooks with the Kindle. Even if you leave aside the rumors of the Kindle ‘Hollywood’ Tablet, supposedly being produced for late 2011/early 2012 with lots of processing power and a larger screen than most tablets, the support structure is getting pretty large. Already you can access Amazon Instant Video via many HDTVs, set-top boxes, BluRay players, TiVos, and more, even if you don’t like to watch video on your PC. Like with the Kindle, once you purchase something you can access it through any device registered to your account. For the most part this is even true of the Amazon Prime selections.
Up until now, the video library has been rather thin. It was clear that Amazon was simply testing the waters and no real threat to any of the more established names in the field. Now, however, things are getting more impressive. You have a fairly good movie selection, admittedly heavily weighted to older titles (though not so much as was the case previously), and access to many TV shows within a day of airing.
Does this mean that Amazon is poised to shove Netflix out of the way and step into a well-deserved spot on top? Not really. By all accounts Netflix hasn’t even really noticed them enough to consider it real competition yet. Who knows what might change in the future, though, with Netflix customers quite vocally unhappy about the handling of recent price hikes due to a jump in operational costs. It seems like just about everybody is trying to jump on the video streaming bandwagon right now, which means lots of competition but also lots of potential for a well-planned and well-supported endeavor.
With the upcoming Kindle Tablets, Amazon is in a highly advantageous position. Not only can they advertise hardware optimized for video streaming and integrated directly into existing Amazon.com services of all sorts, but a simultaneous release of an Instant Video for Android App would earn them sales space on the vast majority of competing Tablet PCs.
Such an app would have to be something of an inevitability both because of the choice of OS for the Kindle Tablets and the fact that Amazon’s main goal seems to be harnessing media distribution rather than sales. No need to completely close off the competing hardware if you are making your money elsewhere anyway. The Kindle platform has given them a solid grip on the eReading market by being device-independent. I think we can count on Amazon to have learned from their own success.
It again should be noted that Amazon is being slightly deceptive in its prime video count. There are not 9000 movie or shows to watch.. There are ~2000 movies and ~700 tv shows approximately. I spent some time pointing this out to them, and now they have changed the wording to say ‘thousands’. What they were doing,somewhat disingenuously, was counting every 30 min episode of a series as 1 to the count. Other streaming services do not do this.