AmazonTube For Echo Echoes YouTube

By Paul Grimsley

What do you do when Google won’t let you use their video streaming service on your device? You step up to them and you slap them in the face, challenge them to a duel. Well, not literally, but almost.

Not that Amazon hasn’t done similar things itself. I used to be able to get my Amazon Apps through the Google Play Store, but then Amazon wanted to pull people away from Google into its own place designed to compete for that market. I have to dance through a whole series of steps to get Amazon Apps on my phone now.

YouTube has traditionally gone for a different market sector with its YouTube videos, only really starting to compete with Amazon Prime when YouTube Red launched. Nothing original from YouTube Red has yet hit a comparable level to the award winning content from Amazon, but Google could do it, if they throw their weight behind that idea, which doesn’t seem to quite be their direction of choice at the moment.

Apple are going to be entering the original content market soon enough, so Amazon are surely trying to shore up and strengthen themselves in a market they have already made huge strides into.

The biggest player not yet weighing in with their full punch behind the streaming market already has more original content than any of these players though. Disney scooped up both ESPN, 21st Century Fox, and a majority stake in Hulu this year, and have already made the announcement of their intent to start removing their content from third party sites in the next couple of years.

CBS launched with Star Trek’s latest installment. Netflix announced that far from being scared about the Disney move is shifting its focus to more original content — which it has been having a lot of success with. Things are definitely heating up.

In some ways it is great for the customer, but as content becomes further atomized, you are going to reach a point where you have to make a choice on what bundled services you want. Is TV content going to become a little bit like the conversations in ideological bubbles? Amazon people versus Google people, versus Disney people. Or, once the devices and the services settle down and become established modes of watching things, will the big companies start to become more friendly again?

Big shifts are occurring in the entertainment industry at the moment, so the lay of the land in 2018 may look drastically different than it looks now. We shall see.