Amazon may soon launch film, music locker service
Amazon has spoken with some of the major record companies and Hollywood film studios about creating a digital locker service and could announce the plans as early as next week, sources told CNET. — Sources from both the film …
Context & Ripple Effects
CNET reports, citing unnamed sources, that Amazon has been talking with major record companies and Hollywood studios about a digital locker for film and music, with an announcement possible as early as next week — a rumor, not a confirmed product, and one whose fate hinges on whether those rights holders sign on.
The timing fits a pattern in the corpus: Amazon still sells only simple Kindle e-readers while the iPad 2 and a wave of Android tablets press on its franchise, and it has already resorted to giving Kindles away free in the UK as an iPad countermeasure. Analyst chatter holds that Amazon has quietly assembled the tools to be a major tablet player, and an Android-based Kindle is itself rumored — a cloud media locker is exactly the kind of service that would give such a device something to sell.
First-order effects
- If announced, the immediate question lands on the major labels and studios: license the locker and take a cut, or withhold rights and risk Amazon launching around them, as the sourcing suggests talks are still open rather than signed.
Second-order effects
- Apple, already pressing the Kindle via the iPad 2, would face a rival bundling device-plus-cloud-media against its own ecosystem, and other tablet makers running Android would gain a ready-made content service to point at.
Third-order effects
- A licensed Amazon locker would accelerate the migration of personal music and film collections off hard drives and devices into cloud accounts, making rights negotiation with labels and studios the gating step for every consumer cloud-media service that follows.
The trend: Consumer media ownership is shifting from locally stored files to cloud-hosted lockers and streams, with each major platform's entry gated by studio and label licensing talks.