Amazon Launching Streaming Video Service: Will They Use Amazon Web Services?

Today, at The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos made reference to a new streaming video service Amazon will be launching in the next few weeks. While details were not discussed and very little info was given out, it’s not surprising to see Amazon launch a streaming service based offering to go along side Amazon’s Unbox service.

While I think it is great that companies like Amazon are experimenting with streaming media based offerings, there is no demand in the market for such a service today. I love Amazon and I love my TiVo, but to date, Amazon’s Unbox service has had no real success in the market and consumers are not asking for more video based services to stream what is expected to be movies to their PC. The whole movies to the PC business has been tried for years, in all forms, and with every kind of business model. Lets face it. Consumers decide what gets adopted, not technology and content owners and my fear is that with the name Amazon has in the industry, expectations will be set way too high by many of what they think Amazon’s streaming media based offering should turn into.

I hope Amazon launches it quietly and uses it as a test for how content is consumed, how the technology works and to basically get their feet wet with streaming. If the service is hyped and expectations run wild, it will hurt the entire industry when the service does not get as much adoption as some may think.

But for me, the bigger thing to watch from this service is how the content will be delivered? Is Amazon planning to stream the video from their network? To date, I don’t know of Amazon having any kind of content delivery footprint using Flash Media Servers to be able to stream video. Could be they won’t use Flash or that while Jeff called it "streaming" it might actually be progressive download. But the infrastructure side of this offering is really what we need to watch. As Amazon slowly turns into a CDN for video, it will be interesting if this new service now as acts the catalyst for Amazon to build out their network to support streaming or if they plan to use a third party CDN.