Wow. This is outstanding. Amazon is solidly developing a one-stop centralized base of entertainment. Even more enticing is that it's free with prime, and even if you don't have prime, it's worth getting prime for: a small fee for a year's access to most music/films you could want. And then you have prime, which makes it much more enticing to buy products on Amazon (due to cheaper, faster delivery). Smart.
(I am aware that Amazon's music library is currently not as large as that of its competitors. I think it is reasonable to assume that this will change in the near future.)
The more significant thing to note here is that the general trend in online businesses (obvious examples will include Google, Apple, and Facebook) is that every business is trying to create its own walled garden --- they try to provide all the services that any user could need, such that the user would not do business with any competitors, and so the user would interface with the business as much as possible. Apple did a remarkably good job at this with iTunes back in the day --- they were the first to provide access to a massive online store of entertainment and to integrate it very heavily with their products.
Amazon, however, is taking the cake in this respect. Their products are extremely well-integrated: www.amazon.com is gradually becoming a one-stop-destination for most media and for general shopping. Perhaps this is due to Amazon's perseverance: I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.
Do you really think so? I find Amazon Instant Video to be a distant also-ran to Netflix, and this music service is vastly inferior to literally every other one I have tried.
Amazon Prime has a solid video library, even compared to Netflix - or at least, it does in the UK. It's amazing how they're screwing it up on the positioning/awareness front though.
Only a few years ago, I was a convinced LoveFilm customer (Amazon bought LoveFilm in 2011) and only used Netflix on free trials. Oh how times have changed: since rebranding to Instant Video from LoveFilm, their base has dropped even further, and while everyone I speak to has at least heard of Netflix, nearly nobody is aware that their Amazon Prime membership also includes video.
And now with music, they don't even have a good library? Psssh.
That's very interesting. I wonder if this is a regional issue. I've heard before that Netflix is much less awesome in a lot of countries than it is here in the US, but I'd never heard about how Amazon was doing overseas. I suppose since Amazon bought a UK-based Netflix competitor, it makes sense for them to support the UK better.
I'm sure LoveFilm's existing content deals must have helped. There used to be a site called Oric which tried to make it easier for people to find the content they want to watch online legally, which was easy to scrape to compare. Now I have to rely on a dodgy mix of sites like http://netflix.maft.co/, http://netflixukcompletelist.blogspot.co.uk/, http://uk.istreamguide.com/, paired with import.io and trawling Amazon's prime video site.
> I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.
I can see AWS being squeezed by outfits like Digital Ocean and Linode on the low end and Google Compute/App Engine on the high end. Anecdotally, I used to run some servers on AWS but moved them to DO & Linode as they're cheaper, faster & simpler.
While I agree you point that on the lower end Amazon will lose some of its hold to the more cost-effective solution providers, IMHO, it is not facing that much pressure from GAE/GCE, for the reason that the latter is yet to provide a list of service that is as comprehensive AWS's.
My previous project is about a data warehouse solution using Amazon Redshift. The whole stack is host on AWS: S3 for logs, EMR for ETL then Redshift for ingestion, job flow orchestrated using DataPipeline. One stand solution, work seamlessly. It really makes me appreciate the vastness and integration of AWS as a whole.
It is; I just spent the last two weeks putting together a very handsome CloudFormation template that can attest to that. I'm almost considering creating a custom CF resource provider to let me spawn DigitalOcean droplets, though.
(And to let me use CloudFlare CDN distributions instead of CloudFront ones. Amazon need to either finish CloudFront, or kill it; this purgatorial state where it works but it takes 30 minutes to make any changes, and where only half of its APIs are exposed in the SDK libraries, is obnoxious.)
I love CloudFormation, but, unfortunately, it's much neglected, doesn't support latest features, and is completely missing major services. The language is so primitive, I had to write custom extensions that compiles to their format. Another rarely used, but very power service is SWF - I bet CF is built entirely on top of it.
Amazon's not making their money on random individual users, and companies aren't jumping to migrate away from it. AWS is way more than just a VPS provider.
(I am aware that Amazon's music library is currently not as large as that of its competitors. I think it is reasonable to assume that this will change in the near future.)
The more significant thing to note here is that the general trend in online businesses (obvious examples will include Google, Apple, and Facebook) is that every business is trying to create its own walled garden --- they try to provide all the services that any user could need, such that the user would not do business with any competitors, and so the user would interface with the business as much as possible. Apple did a remarkably good job at this with iTunes back in the day --- they were the first to provide access to a massive online store of entertainment and to integrate it very heavily with their products.
Amazon, however, is taking the cake in this respect. Their products are extremely well-integrated: www.amazon.com is gradually becoming a one-stop-destination for most media and for general shopping. Perhaps this is due to Amazon's perseverance: I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.