Enter Stage Right: Video Publishing Intrigue

Can Amazon KO Netflix?

Open curtain on the next chapter of Amazon Intrigue (call it aggressive business practices or is it really good business practices as some claim?)

A clash of the video-streaming titans, Hulu and Netflix, has been going on for a short time --- now throw Amazon with an app for streaming videos into the mix and the clash goes a bit nuclear.

But, does Amazon really have the necessary library of movies to be competitive with the enormous Netflix? Seems the method of counting available streams (videos) are not standardized --- More intrigue.

Christopher Zara of International Business Times has these juicy details on the latest Amazon moves:

Amazon Moves To Pummel Netflix With Instant Video iPad App

Apparently not content with having dismantled the book-publishing industry, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) has ramped up its efforts to assume dominion over the burgeoning world of video streaming.


The gargantuan online retailer on Wednesday released an iPad app that provides video streaming for movies and television shows available through its Instant Video service. The free app lets anyone with an iPad buy and stream movies and TV shows, while Amazon Prime members in the U.S. can watch them for free. It also allows subscribers to download videos they've purchased to watch them at a later time. The app's release comes just one day after Hulu made its Hulu Plus content available on Apple TV -- Apple's digital-media receiver.

Amazon's Instant Video service is already offered as an added bonus to subscribers of Amazon Prime, but the iPad app is seen as a major step for Amazon in its attempt to compete directly with Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX). The latter has been in its own video-streaming war with Hulu, but with 24 million subscribers in the United States alone, Netflix is the market leader in video streaming. If Amazon gets its way, however, that will soon change.

"The immediate access to 120,000 videos may convince more people to sign up for Prime," wrote CNet's Lance Whitney, "even Netflix users like me who can't always find our favorite movies or TV shows available for streaming."

Netflix had long been concerned about the possibility of Amazon splitting off its Prime service into a direct competitor. In January, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings report that he expects Amazon "to continue to offer [its] video service as a free extra with Prime domestically, but also to brand [its] video subscription offering as a stand-alone service at a price less than ours."

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Book Marketing: Why Digital Booking is Better than Bricks-and-Mortar Booking

I don't ever want to see physical bookstores disappear...and I don't feel they will completely. But, having said that, we as writers need to understand some basic dynamics to survive.

To understand why digital processing of books is completely dominating the book publishing, marketing and selling world, you have to understand what happened in the demise of giants like Blockbuster and Barnes and Noble and the rise of companies such as Netflix and Amazon.

Randall Stross , writer of the NYTimes Digital Domain column, gives us a good insight to changing business models and, in my opinion, how and why they can affect us as writers:

Why Bricks and Clicks Don’t Always Mix

NOT so long ago, in 2005, Blockbuster seemed invincible. However you preferred to rent movies — in stores or online — the company was ready to accommodate you.

At the time, Netflix could offer only one way of obtaining a movie (the mail) and one way of returning it (the mail). It was clicks, with no bricks.

Of course, we now know that Netflix has done just fine. In January 2005, its shares traded in the $11 range. On Friday, they closed at $140.46, giving the company a market capitalization of $7.35 billion.

As for Blockbuster, which was spun off from Viacom in 2004, it’s now a penny stock, and its woes are as visible as the “Closing” banner in the window of a store in your neighborhood. The company recently warned that it might file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Last week, its chief financial officer resigned. (A spokeswoman for Blockbuster declined a request for an interview with a company representative.)

Blockbuster’s experience shows that executing a bricks-and-clicks strategy entails a high degree of difficulty, managing not just two very different kinds of businesses, with dissimilar domains of expertise, but also a third challenge: integrating two separate systems. An online-only service can remain a best-in-class operation because its executives focus, focus, focus on just the online business.

In the handicapping of likely winners and losers in 2005, Netflix seemed unlikely to survive, let alone thrive. Netflix is “not a sustainable business,” Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, told SmartMoney that year. In his view, successful Internet businesses tended to “have a bricks-and-mortar component.” That is, retail stores.

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