Buried in all the Bill Gates-Steve Ballmer coffee talk at the All Things Digital conference is a semi-interesting nugget from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was first to take the stage with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. When the discussion moved to web video, Bezos let slip that his company will be launching a new for-pay video streaming service “in the next couple of weeks.”
That’s about it for the details, except that you’ll be able to pay a la carte vs. subscription. And while some bloggers have added that the service will offer movies, none of the early coverage has a quote from Bezos specifically saying that this will involve Hollywood studio offerings. Amazon already plays in the downloadable movie space via Unbox and it’s not a smashing success so far.
Most of the talk revolved around Amazon’s new e-book reader, Kindle, although Bezos is still hesitant to give up exact sales figures. But it was clear from his answers to Mossberg’s questions that the Amazon CEO is giving laser beam-like focus to the Kindle and that it will end up accounting for a better slice of company revenue. Which begs the following questions from this corner: will the Kindle have a role in the new streaming video service? If not “in the next couple of weeks,” then when? And if the current version doesn’t have the specs to handle video, what about Kindle 2.0? Does Amazon even want to play in this arena?
Buried in all the Bill Gates-Steve Ballmer coffee talk at the All Things Digital conference is a semi-interesting nugget from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was first to take the stage with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. When the discussion moved to web video, Bezos let slip that his company will be launching a new for-pay video streaming service “in the next couple of weeks.”
That’s about it for the details, except that you’ll be able to pay a la carte vs. subscription. And while some bloggers have added that the service will offer movies, none of the early coverage has a quote from Bezos specifically saying that this will involve Hollywood studio offerings. Amazon already plays in the downloadable movie space via Unbox and it’s not a smashing success so far.
Most of the talk revolved around Amazon’s new e-book reader, Kindle, although Bezos is still hesitant to give up exact sales figures. But it was clear from his answers to Mossberg’s questions that the Amazon CEO is giving laser beam-like focus to the Kindle and that it will end up accounting for a better slice of company revenue. Which begs the following questions from this corner: will the Kindle have a role in the new streaming video service? If not “in the next couple of weeks,” then when? And if the current version doesn’t have the specs to handle video, what about Kindle 2.0? Does Amazon even want to play in this arena?
Read [All Things Digital]
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