The next company in a seemingly never-ending deluge of company working on some kind of online TV streaming service? It’s Amazon, according to a WSJ report.
Amazon has apparently approached some major “media conglomerates” to strike up some deals for a service that would combine channels you might get on cable with content you could stream on Amazon. As it often goes with these reports, the companies Amazon has been chatting up have not been named, although there are supposedly three of them, and they’re presumably the networks you’d traditionally think of as mostly on your regular ol’ television set. First off, given its selection of streaming content as well as its own original shows, Amazon has at least some leverage studios and other media companies. And secondly, Amazon has proved itself willing to sacrifice immediate profits where it sees it could make long term gains.
Other companies are of course giving this kind of service a try. Intel had been throwing big bucks at a TV streaming offering, but it sold the project to Verizon late last year, most likely due to an inability to lock up content. Netflix is purportedly working on its own kind of future TV project too, but these deals just aren’t happening yet. But as the WSJ points out, Amazon might be in the best position to actually make the unicorn of a streaming TV service a real thing.
The WSJ piece also mentioned that Amazon is reportedly working on its own set-top box, a la Roku, that may or may not come out some time in the next year. In light of all the rumours of the things Amazon is supposedly up to in the TV world, it’s safe to say the company probably has something on the horizon. It’s just not entirely clear what. [WSJ]
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