In July, we talked a little about Amazon rolling out Amazon Video on Demand, the successor to the retail giant’s not tremendously successful Amazon Unbox service. Today, Bezos’s baby has officially launched Video on Demand featuring movies, television episodes, and other video clips.
Unlike Unbox, VoD is Mac-compatible, allowing you to stream videos directly in your browser. PC users can download episodes to their computer, and owners of TiVOs or Sony BRAVIA TVs with the Bravia Internet Link can do the same. There’s also the ability to download videos to a portable device, though unsurprisingly, the world’s most popular portable video devices are not among the list of compatible players.
Will VoD succeed where Unbox failed? My signs say not so much. VoD has serious competition from the likes of not just iTunes, but also Hulu, which offers a comparable (if not bigger) catalog, and is ad-supported instead of pay-per-play. Nor does Amazon’s video store have the simplicity of iTunes—some shows are available for rent, others only for purchase; you get roughly two minutes of free viewing for any of them before you’re prompted to shell out.
Even with Amazon’s considerable retail weight, I don’t think VoD is going to reach even the levels of success that Amazon’s music store has seen—the primary selling point there, after all, was DRM-free music compatible with any device, something that VoD simply cannot offer. The video market is simply too splintered at present, and there’s little compelling in Amazon’s offering unless you’re a TiVo or Sony Bravia owner. But I’ve been known to be wrong before—if rarely.
