Kindle Vella

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Yep. People often mistakenly believe they have their finger on the pulse of public sentiment in general RE these things.


Agreed. And even outside of that group. There are many fairly mainstream genre authors who use Wattpad and the like to disseminate side projects and gauge fan reaction.

Those who are dismissing this as a complete swing and a miss probably only have their fingers on their own pulses.

Indeed. Wattpad--albeit not my cuppa, mind you--is just a less nerdy, easier-to-use, smartphone-friendly fanfiction.net, really. For those seeking a place for their creative outlets, trying to build a fanbase, whether writing fanfic or something more independent...not a bad spot. I can easily see Amazon thinking that they could monetize this AND if one thinks about it--any author could use it to find their reading demographic, too, if their writing leans in that demographic age group.

Hitch

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Indeed. Wattpad--albeit not my cuppa, mind you--is just a less nerdy, easier-to-use, smartphone-friendly fanfiction.net, really. For those seeking a place for their creative outlets, trying to build a fanbase, whether writing fanfic or something more independent...not a bad spot. I can easily see Amazon thinking that they could monetize this AND if one thinks about it--any author could use it to find their reading demographic, too, if their writing leans in that demographic age group.

Hitch

Oh, this idea is definitely not my bag, either. I'm not even a little interested. I joined Wattpad to read one established author's serialized Weird Western (and I only did that after all the installments were available!). I'm just well aware that my own proclivities are not all that indicative of much of anything, RE the wide world, these days. I'm not a demographic that new ventures need to factor in. I also know that Amazon rarely whiffs. If they see enough potential, there's very likely enough interest (from both creators and consumers) to make a go of it. For a while, anyway. Until the wheel turns again and they're off starting something else.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Oh, this idea is definitely not my bag, either. I'm not even a little interested. I joined Wattpad to read one established author's serialized Weird Western (and I only did that after all the installments were available!). I'm just well aware that my own proclivities are not all that indicative of much of anything, RE the wide world, these days. I'm not a demographic that new ventures need to factor in. I also know that Amazon rarely whiffs. If they see enough potential, there's very likely enough interest (from both creators and consumers) to make a go of it. For a while, anyway. Until the wheel turns again and they're off starting something else.

Indeed (Amazon only whiffs occasionally).

Hitch

[binaryhermit]

Oh, Amazon whiffs pretty frequently. But one AWS pays for a whole lot of massive failures.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

Oh, Amazon whiffs pretty frequently. But one AWS pays for a whole lot of massive failures.

Examples please. And please note that by "whiffs", I mean a complete strikeout. A verifiable financial failure. I know it happens, but "pretty frequently" seems quite disingenuous to me.

[binaryhermit]

Fire Phone, for the most obvious one.
Living Social, which they bought for $175 million and "sold" to groupon for $0 about 6 years later.

There's some others here https://www.gobankingrates.com/money...ness-failures/

[DiapDealer]

The Fire Phone was definitely foremost in my mind, too.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

Oh, Amazon whiffs pretty frequently. But one AWS pays for a whole lot of massive failures.

Amazon has a pretty interesting business model in that they generally don't charge for each of their services. Prime Video, Prime Music, etc are all bundled up under Prime, so they don't have to be super successful individually, they just have to be seen by the customer as adding value. They can experiment with all sorts of little niche services, and few remember or even know if a particular experiment is successful or not.

[ApK]

Whether you characterize Amazon's whiffs as "pretty frequent" or "only occasional" I think depends on how you want compare percentages (misses versus wins or misses overall, or attempts vs other large tech companies), but I think they're doing pretty well on the innovation front. They are willing to try stuff and risk losing more often than many others, and the number of hits they get from it seems to pay off for them. And for us, usually, Alexa's frustrating petulant-teenager-like behavior notwithstanding.

ApK

[JSWolf]

Prime Video has really gotten quite good. Amazon really does give a good value with all the other benefits thrown in as well such as free priority shipping Prime Reading, Prime Music, etc.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Prime Video has really gotten quite good

Yeah, I hope Prime Video doesn't get too carried away. I appreciate that Prime Video has lots of Spaghetti Westerns and old schlocky horror movies and old films.

Netflix doesn't really have any of this any longer.

[Quoth]

Disney may destroy Netflex. Massive catalogue. Bought up lots of other studios. Running since 1920s. Produced for TV from the 1950s and bought a TV channel years ago (ABC, though it didn't do well). Netflex was never very profitable and has relied deals with ISPs and getting ISPs to host server nodes.
Every toy shop has Disney branded products.

Unlike Netflix, Amazon has AWS, a serious player, one of top five data hosting and makes so much profit that Prime is like a lemonade stand.

There will only be Disney and Amazon left streaming video.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Quoth

There will only be Disney and Amazon left streaming video.

You don't think the current trend of everyone carving up a niche streaming service of their own properties like, Paramount+ and Peacock, in a new a la carte Cable-like model will persists? Or do you think Disney will simply own all of them so the net will be the same?

ApK

"In the future, there will only be one health insurance company: Microsoft Health Plans."
--my former IT manager, after the insurance company we worked for merged with another for the nth time.

[Quoth]

The cost is very high for anything other than very low volume niche shorts.
Any mass market offering needs a MASSIVE amount of distributed VOD servers and cooperation of all the main ISPs in target markets. Literally tens of thousands of times more expensive than a Satellite TV channel for a mass market. It's massively more expensive than broadcast cable.

Then there is the cost of decent content.

IBM's Watson was maybe right about the world only needing five computers, if you substitute the so called Cloud (just multi-processor servers).

Where are all the encyclopedias? Wikipedia. Even MS cited Wikipedia as the reason to stop.
Social Media is down to Twitter, Linkedin and Faceborg empire in the West.
Amazon has 90% of online english ebook sales.
eBay and Amazon have most of online classified and small business in the West.
We are down to a handful of real search engines.
Translations?
Maps?
User Videos?

The Internet doesn't bring the democracy and diversity imagined in 1980s, (though web sites are from roughly 1992). It has positive feedback. There is one winner per category.

Streaming video is the most expensive thing since 16mm video and VHS to deliver. DVDs are cheaper. But the dreamed of things by capitalists are:
1) Franchises. The sucker managers all over the world pay the capital costs and are locked into the Franchise for supplies.
2) Subscriptions. Eventually people pay more* than simply buying the content they want.

* In 2006 approx surveys in UK and Ireland showed that 92% of viewing time of Satellite and Cable Pay TV subscribers was watching content either free on the aerial or Free to Air Satellite. Back then I worked on a hybrid broadcast and VOD pay TV proposal for an Irish ISP.

I could also write how Pay TV sport and eventually the creation of the Premier League in England and similar in other European countries aided pay TV, especially Sky and destroyed the finances of top clubs with too much money and pressure. The ESL debacle was inevitable. Of COURSE you had to take out the basic sub and add the sport.
Attempts to stop Sky having a monopoly meant simply fans had to take out 2 to 4 subs with different companies at the same price each as before.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Indeed (Amazon only whiffs occasionally).

Hitch

I'm not sure if this counts, but it seems Blue Origin lost out to SpaceX because of a failure to think outside the box, and a failure to consider the economics of scale, which is ironic for Bezos.

Elon Musk's Economies Of Scale Won SpaceX The NASA Moonshot

What made NASA choose SpaceX? Fundamentally, the aspect that differentiates Elon Musk’s companies: leveraging economies of scale...

This is precisely the most significant element of the decision, and where SpaceX had the biggest advantage: Blue Origin’s project was the most conventional, with a three-stage landing design, in line with NASA’s approach, but from which virtually no components were recovered. Dynetics delivered a more innovative and reusability-oriented proposal, but was unambitious, proposing to take just a few astronauts to the moon.

So it's kind of interesting. Amazon / Bezos used to be an innovator, but I don't see that so much these days. They seem to play it safer now they've achieved market dominance, and as such, maybe they effectively suppress advancement. Certainly in ereaders, they lag behind the others, letting others innovate and take the risk, then following after (larger screen size, color screen light, maybe even touch screen). Maybe Bezos is losing his edge, but is in a position where he doesn't need it.

Mind you, now he's complaining about losing the Nasa bid.

https://time.com/5958931/jeff-bezos-elon-musk-moon/