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Amazon NOW STREAMING VIDEO!!!! - July 17, 2008

Media Wonk has generally steered clear of the bloggers favorite sport: bashing the "mainstream media." As a still card-carrying member of the ye olde ink-on-paper guild in my other job, it seemed sort of bad form to go all digerati on my fellow scribblers. But good grief, what has happened to the New York Times, the paper I grew up reading? Yesterday's edition brought us Adam Nagourney's hilarious twisting of his own paper's polling data, in which equal favorability ratings among whites between Barack Obama and John McCain and an 8 to 1 advantage for Obama among Blacks, somehow became a story about Obama failing to "close the divide" on race. And today, we get Brad Stone's error-filled and incoherent write up of an Amazon-furnished leak about the online retailer's new video-on-demand service.

I know times are tough in the newspaper dodge these days, and that we're all stretched painfully thin. But don't big-time newspapers still have, like, editors and stuff?

Let's review:

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service.

Which 40,000 movies and TV programs? Sourced from where? In what window? The same as cable VOD, as iTunes, as Amazon's own Unbox service?

That is different from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to endure lengthy waits as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

No, it's not. Both iTunes and Amazon offer progressive downloads that let users start watching a video within a few minutes. As do most download based services these days. Moreover, it simply puts Amazon on the same footing as Netflix, which already offers streamed movies and TV shows.

It will also let users buy a TV show or movie without actually downloading the video file to the PC’s hard drive. Amazon will store each customer’s selection in what it calls “Your Video Library.” Customers can then watch that show or movie whenever they return to Amazon, even if it is from a different computer or device, a solution that neatly gets around studio concerns about piracy.

Buying access to a TV show or movie without actually downloading the video file to a hard drive is more or less the definition of streaming. As for storing a selection in Your Video Library, Amazon's Unbox service already offers that feature, so it's not exactly a breakthrough now.

I'm also skeptical of the implication that a TV show or movie is stored permanently in Your Video Library, for viewing "whenever they return to Amazon." If true, that implies you've purchased the movie, which makes the transaction more like electronic sell-through than video-on-demand. And Amazon already offers e-sell-through with permanent online storage through Unbox.

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, is also pursuing the technology and media world’s holy grail — an Internet pipeline to the TV. It has struck a deal with Sony Electronics to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs.

Very nice, but Netflix, Vudu, Apple TV, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, TiVo and many others all offer solutions for streaming video to the TV. The fact that a few thousand Bravia Internet Video Link owners will be able to stream Amazon content without a set-top box is a nice promotion for Bravia TV sets but it offers no particular advantage for Amazon apart from the exposure that comes from Sony's marketing of Bravia. 

As for embedding the Amazon VOD store in future Bravia sets, again, nice, but not exactly a breakthrough.

Here's what would appear to be the little bit of actual news in the story:

After a slow start for its download-based Unbox service, Amazon is developing a streaming based video-on-demand service called Amazon Video On Demand. The new service, which begins its beta phase today with a small number of invited Amazon customers, will apparently allow videos to be watched inside a browser, rather than requiring users to download a proprietary player, as with Unbox.

Amazon claims the service offers 40,000 movies and TV shows, though whether it's the same library of content available through Unbox is unclear. Pricing and title availability have not yet been announced. Nor is it clear whether or how many titles will be available in high-def.

To promote the beta launch, Amazon has struck a deal with Sony to make the new service available to Bravia TV set owners who have purchased the $299 Bravia Internet Video Link adapter that allows video to be streamed to the set without a set-top box.
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