And he was telling them the same thing 5 years ego. And 5 years before that. And 5 years before that as well. I wonder what he'll be telling them in 5 years time, or in 10 for that matter.
I'm only half joking, the fact that PRIME is part of their retail sales program means that they do make more sales to PRIME members. If their deals for content are cheap enough, it could work without significant changes... eventually.
I'm just amazed that they are able to do this for so long. Their P/E (in profitable quarters) is astronomical.
> I'm just amazed that they are able to do this for so long.
They keep wiggling into new growth markets. If they were just a bookstore their stock price would've collapsed. But they've gotten into:
* Retail (a multi-trillion dollar market in the U.S. alone)
* Media sales and rental (much smaller)
* Cloud computing (something like $100 billin and growing)
* Consumer computing devices (something in the low hundreds of billions)
All they have to do to justify their P/E is be in a position to credibly say they can get a serious slice of these markets. And honestly, they're positioned extremely well in all four:
* In retail they're indisputably at the lead of home shopping, which seems to be the future.
* There one of a handful of companies with serious share in movie/music distribution at this point
* They're probably the biggest cloud provider, one that other cloud providers are built on.
* Given the growing importance of media as a selling point and revenue stream for device makers, and great traction in tablets, they're positioned very well in devices too.
Their P/E is astronomical because their business model is based on buying market share. If you don't think that's a valid strategy, you don't invest in AMZN at all.
Would that it were true that you could simply compare tech companies by P/E to get a read on how "jazzed" the market is about a company, but Amazon and Apple are great illustrations of why you can't.
This sounds somewhat bizarre. For physical goods it made sense as you had to build big expensive distribution centres. This means big fixed costs and low variable costs.
For streaming video delivery the fixed costs are almost zero while the variable costs are proportional to the amount of video watched.
The article that the deals Netflix and Amazon do with the content providers are fixed cost deals - ie pay a certain amount of money no matter how many or how few customers watch the content. If they are variable costs deals (per view) then it would be mostly insane doing them for more revenue that you get from the viewers.
Does anyone know how these content deals are structured in terms of fixed amounts versus per view amounts?
I imagine there are various fixed and variable parts to some of these deals (no inside knowledge).
Imagine though that you are selling exclusive rights to your catalog for a fixed period of time (say 2 years). You would want to maximise revenue while managing risk. As a content provider you may not have sufficient information to figure out what the likely number of views will be in two years times as there are multiple factors you don't have much historical data on (viewer behavior, projected growth rate). Fixed bids are a lot easier to compare than comparing how you think Amazon Instant and Netflix growth rates and customer behavior will change over time.
If I was the content owner I would do the deal as per view, and with overall minimum payments. That way you get a minimum payment for your time and you share in the success of the content.
True, but you can buy the streaming service as you use it. There are numerous CDNs out there, and Amazon itself has the same. Amazon did not need to spend an additional billion dollars in order to serve the first 10,000 customers of video.
If the expenses are coming from additional fixed infrastructure then the article is still misleading - the more viewers you have the lower the per viewer cost. The article in no way implies that infrastructure is relevant to their monetary claims.
Personally, my use of Prime is significantly different than Netflix.
I've rarely used Prime free content, but I have rented a number of recent movies and "bought" a few recent seasons of TV shows.
Off the top of my head, Amazon has collected more cash from me for video streaming in the last 6 months than Netflix, but I've been consuming probably 10x more data from Netflix.
I wonder if / how Hastings comparison accounts for this?
This is my usage exactly. I won't rent through Sony because they impose a 24 hour period - I rarely have two consecutive hours to spend watching a movie any given day. Amazon uses a 48 hour period, which I can live with.
Yeah I use Amazon Prime for all of my renting as well...
It's very easy to get the movies on my xbox, they cost about half as much as they would on itunes to rent, and they have a much better selection of movies I can see than Netflix since I can rent the ones I'm actually interested in seeing.
>Reed's point is, I assume, that Amazon is paying/will pay approximately $1B to license content for prime streaming, not ppv content.
That's the thing...
I don't see how Hastings would have any way to separate the two considering Amazon content can be both.
For example, anyone can rent RAN for $2 or buy it for $10 while Prime subscribers can stream it free. Of course, you can also buy a half a dozen physical formats from Amazon as well.
Netflix is a completely different service.
Therefore, I wonder how relevant Reed's "They outbid us and we bid X" assessment of Amazon's costs could be.
Obviously, he's far from certain with the half a billion dollar spread present in his estimate and all.
>Is the availability of prime streaming a factor in you choosing Amazon PPV vs, say, Apple?
I imagine it's a combination of several things...
1) I've been a Prime subscriber for 6 years and Amazon has never let me down in terms of service at any level. 2) I've had a few Apple devices over the years, but never bought into the ecosystem at all. 3) It's only recently (3 or 4 years) that I've really bought into digital goods at all. I have a bunch of music on Amazon MP3 and they started pushing the video service right around the time I outfitted my house with a bunch of Rokus.
> Netflix CEO: Amazon Losing Up to $1 Billion a Year on Streaming Video
I'm skeptical.
This posits that Amazon is spending about 1/4-1/2 of what Netflix spends (Netflix on track for $2.1 billion this year), to stream about 1/20th as much (Netflix 33% of internet traffic, Amazon 1.8%), from a greatly inferior content catalog.
I think Bezos & Co. can cut better deals than that.
Not me! The major consumer use case for anything above basic DSL bandwidth is video. That has been obvious for a decade at least. No ISP should be selling fat consumer pipes and expect people to just send the occasional email.
Trying to charge both sides is just monopolist idiocy.
Hastings says the estimate is based on head-to-head competition. If I'm selling streaming rights for property A, I'm going to go with the people who pay me the most. If Bezos says, "But gosh, we aren't showing it to as many people," my answer will be "Tough!"
You are probably right, but you (and Hastings) may not be. If I am a negotiator at Amazon, I am cutting the following deal:
- Titles we provide free to our customers
- Titles we provide for a charge which we split the fee with content producer at some ratio
- Placement of those for pay titles on the site so they are bought more
I'd sum the value of the contract and show how even though Amazon will not give as much cash in the deal, the content producer will net a bigger positive number.
Obviously this is speculation, but I could see that playing out easily.
There are lots of options besides a blanket per-title or per-library fee.
One possibility would be per-stream (per-view) licensing.
Another could be per registered user or percentage of revenue.
Amazon's best bet may be to include prime streaming as an incremental addition to their paid rental streaming licenses.
Lots of options, and Amazon has enough reach and enough channels to customers that I expect a smart business to be able to structure a better deal than paying 40-80 times as much for delivered customer value as a single-channel competitor.
Amazon providing Netflix with infrastructure does not figure in. The estimate (which I agree is suspect) has to do with the cost of acquiring content rights. If Amazon is spending more money on content rights than they pull in from users consuming that content, then they're running their streaming service at a loss. Netflix running on their hardware doesn't factor in.
Reid is saying Amazon is paying half of what Netflix is paying for a tiny fraction of the latter's catalog and an even tinier fraction of Netflix's volume? If that's what he's saying I'm hard pressed to think he actually believes it.
Also, Amazon can afford to lose a bit (probably not a billion, though) on its streaming service if 1) more people sign up for Prime as a result and 2) Prime members buy more inventory from Amazon.
I think they'd do well to devote resources to making browsing videos less like shopping on Amazon. When I log into Netflix, I feel like a valued customer. They go out of their way to find stuff I'd love to watch and NEVER try to sell me anything. I've payed money and they want to give me a great service.
Comparatively, browsing videos on Amazon feels like I'm in Walmart. I am bombarded with continuous advertisements, reminded that I can buy the movies I'm looking at on DVD and BlueRay (almost throwing the shitty streaming quality in my face), and being sold a Kindle. Is nobody in charge of the user experience for Amazon Instant Video?
Hook up a Roku or other set-top box to your TV. Run the Amazon Instant Video app. It works just like Netflix. No store, no ads, just flipping through box art to choose movies or shows to watch.
AdBlock Plus would not change anything. He's complaining about Amazon Instant Video's web interface being part of the Amazon store, so when browsing videos to watch you also see the list of other formats you can buy each in, related products, 'customers also bought' products, etc. These are not ads and AdBlock does not remove them as it'd simply be wiping out the whole page.
IMO, this is not an issue for Amazon as Amazon Instant Video is still a support business for Amazon. It is used to sell more Prime subscriptions (and more Kindles as well). It seems that now Amazon is testing if it could be a viable standalone business but it’s not guaranteed.
It seems like SVOD services are generally “support businesses” that aim to promote a company’s main product/service that is sold at a higher margin. For instance, DISH Network offers access to Blockbuster SVOD platform as an add-on to its pay-TV subscription (the idea here is to get more pay-TV subscribers). Comcast XFINITY SVOD service is provided on top of other Comcast services and aims to attract more pay-TV and broadband subscribers. We could even argue that Netflix Instant Streaming was first used to support Netflix “DVD by Mail” business (even if it might not be completely the case here).
The margins on those SVOD services are low compare to the “pay-TV or “DVD by Mail” business. In Q3 2012, Netflix contribution margin for its domestic streaming business was 16.4% vs 48% for its domestic “DVD by Mail” business. As pointed out earlier, for SVOD to work, you need volume. Thus, Netflix strong push for its international expansion. Amazon might pull it off, but it will require significant investment outside the US to work out.
I loved how the spokesman turned around the negativity in one swoop. From "Amazon's losing money" to "it's right that Prime Instant Video is an amazing value for customers."
At least Amazon prime streaming works on Linux (if Flash can be called "working", but at least it's better than the abomination called Silverlight).
The only reason why I still use Netflix is that fact that I get a MacBook from work (didn't get a choice in that matter)... And even then I am considering canceling the streaming subscription.
I don't get Netflix... Or maybe I do. Isn't their CEO on the Microsoft board?
Hollywood and movies licensing isn't suitable for competitive businesses. One site can do it (netflix) but once more than one tries it everyone will lose. The source of the problem is that Hollywood itself is a monopoly, it gouges so much from the distributors like Netflix/Amazon that any attempt to divide subscribers to their services between each other will end up killing both parties.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] thread"In '97 Amazon had market cap of $291M, in '02 it was 3.5B, in '07 it was $20B and today it's $100B. I don't know... seems to be working."
I'm only half joking, the fact that PRIME is part of their retail sales program means that they do make more sales to PRIME members. If their deals for content are cheap enough, it could work without significant changes... eventually.
I'm just amazed that they are able to do this for so long. Their P/E (in profitable quarters) is astronomical.
They keep wiggling into new growth markets. If they were just a bookstore their stock price would've collapsed. But they've gotten into:
* Retail (a multi-trillion dollar market in the U.S. alone)
* Media sales and rental (much smaller)
* Cloud computing (something like $100 billin and growing)
* Consumer computing devices (something in the low hundreds of billions)
All they have to do to justify their P/E is be in a position to credibly say they can get a serious slice of these markets. And honestly, they're positioned extremely well in all four:
* In retail they're indisputably at the lead of home shopping, which seems to be the future.
* There one of a handful of companies with serious share in movie/music distribution at this point
* They're probably the biggest cloud provider, one that other cloud providers are built on.
* Given the growing importance of media as a selling point and revenue stream for device makers, and great traction in tablets, they're positioned very well in devices too.
Would that it were true that you could simply compare tech companies by P/E to get a read on how "jazzed" the market is about a company, but Amazon and Apple are great illustrations of why you can't.
For streaming video delivery the fixed costs are almost zero while the variable costs are proportional to the amount of video watched.
The article that the deals Netflix and Amazon do with the content providers are fixed cost deals - ie pay a certain amount of money no matter how many or how few customers watch the content. If they are variable costs deals (per view) then it would be mostly insane doing them for more revenue that you get from the viewers.
Does anyone know how these content deals are structured in terms of fixed amounts versus per view amounts?
Imagine though that you are selling exclusive rights to your catalog for a fixed period of time (say 2 years). You would want to maximise revenue while managing risk. As a content provider you may not have sufficient information to figure out what the likely number of views will be in two years times as there are multiple factors you don't have much historical data on (viewer behavior, projected growth rate). Fixed bids are a lot easier to compare than comparing how you think Amazon Instant and Netflix growth rates and customer behavior will change over time.
If the expenses are coming from additional fixed infrastructure then the article is still misleading - the more viewers you have the lower the per viewer cost. The article in no way implies that infrastructure is relevant to their monetary claims.
I've rarely used Prime free content, but I have rented a number of recent movies and "bought" a few recent seasons of TV shows.
Off the top of my head, Amazon has collected more cash from me for video streaming in the last 6 months than Netflix, but I've been consuming probably 10x more data from Netflix.
I wonder if / how Hastings comparison accounts for this?
It's very easy to get the movies on my xbox, they cost about half as much as they would on itunes to rent, and they have a much better selection of movies I can see than Netflix since I can rent the ones I'm actually interested in seeing.
Is the availability of prime streaming a factor in you choosing Amazon PPV vs, say, Apple?
That's the thing...
I don't see how Hastings would have any way to separate the two considering Amazon content can be both.
For example, anyone can rent RAN for $2 or buy it for $10 while Prime subscribers can stream it free. Of course, you can also buy a half a dozen physical formats from Amazon as well.
Netflix is a completely different service.
Therefore, I wonder how relevant Reed's "They outbid us and we bid X" assessment of Amazon's costs could be.
Obviously, he's far from certain with the half a billion dollar spread present in his estimate and all.
>Is the availability of prime streaming a factor in you choosing Amazon PPV vs, say, Apple?
I imagine it's a combination of several things...
1) I've been a Prime subscriber for 6 years and Amazon has never let me down in terms of service at any level. 2) I've had a few Apple devices over the years, but never bought into the ecosystem at all. 3) It's only recently (3 or 4 years) that I've really bought into digital goods at all. I have a bunch of music on Amazon MP3 and they started pushing the video service right around the time I outfitted my house with a bunch of Rokus.
1: http://www.amazon.com/Ran/dp/B0037EAJAC
I'm skeptical.
This posits that Amazon is spending about 1/4-1/2 of what Netflix spends (Netflix on track for $2.1 billion this year), to stream about 1/20th as much (Netflix 33% of internet traffic, Amazon 1.8%), from a greatly inferior content catalog.
I think Bezos & Co. can cut better deals than that.
Numbers like that give me pause. I can kind of see where the anti-Network Neutrality folks are coming from.
Trying to charge both sides is just monopolist idiocy.
Hastings says the estimate is based on head-to-head competition. If I'm selling streaming rights for property A, I'm going to go with the people who pay me the most. If Bezos says, "But gosh, we aren't showing it to as many people," my answer will be "Tough!"
- Titles we provide free to our customers
- Titles we provide for a charge which we split the fee with content producer at some ratio
- Placement of those for pay titles on the site so they are bought more
I'd sum the value of the contract and show how even though Amazon will not give as much cash in the deal, the content producer will net a bigger positive number.
Obviously this is speculation, but I could see that playing out easily.
One possibility would be per-stream (per-view) licensing.
Another could be per registered user or percentage of revenue.
Amazon's best bet may be to include prime streaming as an incremental addition to their paid rental streaming licenses.
Lots of options, and Amazon has enough reach and enough channels to customers that I expect a smart business to be able to structure a better deal than paying 40-80 times as much for delivered customer value as a single-channel competitor.
I think Amazon is not losing money at all. They're supplying a really big customer with resources and selling at retail as well.
Also, Amazon can afford to lose a bit (probably not a billion, though) on its streaming service if 1) more people sign up for Prime as a result and 2) Prime members buy more inventory from Amazon.
Comparatively, browsing videos on Amazon feels like I'm in Walmart. I am bombarded with continuous advertisements, reminded that I can buy the movies I'm looking at on DVD and BlueRay (almost throwing the shitty streaming quality in my face), and being sold a Kindle. Is nobody in charge of the user experience for Amazon Instant Video?
It seems like SVOD services are generally “support businesses” that aim to promote a company’s main product/service that is sold at a higher margin. For instance, DISH Network offers access to Blockbuster SVOD platform as an add-on to its pay-TV subscription (the idea here is to get more pay-TV subscribers). Comcast XFINITY SVOD service is provided on top of other Comcast services and aims to attract more pay-TV and broadband subscribers. We could even argue that Netflix Instant Streaming was first used to support Netflix “DVD by Mail” business (even if it might not be completely the case here).
The margins on those SVOD services are low compare to the “pay-TV or “DVD by Mail” business. In Q3 2012, Netflix contribution margin for its domestic streaming business was 16.4% vs 48% for its domestic “DVD by Mail” business. As pointed out earlier, for SVOD to work, you need volume. Thus, Netflix strong push for its international expansion. Amazon might pull it off, but it will require significant investment outside the US to work out.
I flat out ignore estimates like this. A sway of a few percent, sure...but 500 million to a billion is laughable at best.
The only reason why I still use Netflix is that fact that I get a MacBook from work (didn't get a choice in that matter)... And even then I am considering canceling the streaming subscription.
I don't get Netflix... Or maybe I do. Isn't their CEO on the Microsoft board?
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/09/reed-hastings-wont-be-retur...
Same thing happening with Spotify and Rdio.