Amazon Prime v/s Netflix

With Netflix suggesting offline viewing to be a distant priority, is this Amazon Prime’s in?

I love my kindle. It was a cheap buy and although it wont make my eyes orgasm with joy, it is still a decent tablet that does well with both e-books and multimedia content. It is primarily used on a commute and it serves me well.

I love my Netflix — it facilitates my crippling procrastination. All of those binge watched series are just placeholders for when I figure out exactly what I want to do with my life.

I love my iPhone with data — it allows me to be completely distracted all of the time. It also allows me to be partially attentive to most conversations that go on around me, often including me. However, I am in the majority that does not have unlimited data.

Do you roughly see where I am going with this?

There is no cost competitive way for me to watch shows on my commute given the current state of the union on data caps. So — downloads, my old friend, we meet again. With Netflix ruling itself out of offline viewing, there is a huge opportunity for Amazon Prime to step in and gobble up market share. I would assume, and not wrongly, that I am also in the majority that has an annual Amazon Prime membership + pays for Netflix monthly. Since all of the titles are released by studios, and original content is still a very nascent theme for places like Netflix, there is a significant amount of overlap in the titles available on Prime and Netflix. Netflix has a huge library of stuff that I will never watch but they also have older series and the aforementioned original content (Notwithstanding how egregious Marco Polo is). If you step back a year or so, most movies and TV Show episodes make it to both Prime and Netflix.

Hence the case for Prime to start charging separately for media, compete defensibly on one side with Google Play and gobble market share aggressively on the other side with Netflix. The online “experiments” with HBO and CBS will only intensify and in a world where studios still deliver the majority of the content — it will become less about a pure media play a la Netflix. Imagine, you know my tastes in shopping, browsing and with a smart IMDB integration, you know what media interests me. With X-Ray, Prime can do all of that.

Next, we make the case for internationalization. Downloaded content will always be in vogue especially if you can bundle it into the device. Cue less technically advanced markets with developing infrastructure, lesser bandwidth and a propensity for discarded trinkets like 2nd generation Kindle Fires and the Hindenburg meets Titanic disaster that is the Fire Phone. You could have a built in ecosystem that does everything you would need from a digital platform.

The need is there and the product market fit is pretty close, this could be a great opportunity which is Primed for Amazon to take over.