How Amazon Outflanked Netflix | Hacker News Reader

How Amazon Outflanked Netflix

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38 pointsziszis57 comments

I have always hated Amazon Video. I don't think Amazon even comes close to Netflix from user perspective.

There is always the confusion of which video is free and belongs to Amazon prime (free) and which ones need to be purchased. Compare that to netflix - You see it, its yours to watch.

Amazon originals are a torture chamber, I cant even name one. Compare that to Netflix - I renewed my membership just to watch House of Cards.

Amazon, Google, Facebook they all fall into this same problem of having a consistent UI across all their offerings. This constraint of consistency leads to a UI design which might not be the best for that particular product. Netflix because it offers just one thing, video streaming, can design UI best for discovery and personalization and wins compared to Amazon video any given day.

There isn't much confusion at all if you don't have any filters then it's clearly marked on the thumbnail of the video. When you search you can select filters. Depending on the app you use (browser, amazon firetv, mobile, smart tv etc.) you also (at least on my browser, phone and tv) select in the settings to filter out paid content.

Amazon has damn good originals: Alpha House(please make season 3!!!), Hand of God, Bosch, Mozart in the Jungle and TMITHC as well as some of it's new pickups like Sneaky Pete and Patriot (the Patriot pilot and premise was amazing) are much better than most Netflix offers(which for the most part offers allot of esoteric comedy / stand up shows and well orange is the new black which I've never bothered to watch). At least to my subjective tastes before the Marvel ("webinatic universe?!") shows came about Netflix only had The House of Cards (and well Marco Polo) as far as originals go.

The Man in The High Castle is pretty good. It's not the same level of production value or acting as many Netflix ones but it's still interesting.

It's not the same level of production value or acting as many Netflix ones

I disagree with that. I thought the production values were quite high. The sets and costumes were amazing. The actors were first rate, but mostly unknown (probably to keep costs down).

It's good, but its no House Of Cards.

I use Amazon (and Netflix) on my PS4 and I've never been confused about which video is free and which requires payment.

If the video is free, the button says "Watch now" or something.

If the video isn't free, there are one or two buttons saying "Buy SD for $XX.XX" and "Buy HD for $XX.XX".

The reason I personally like Amazon Video is that if a movie or TV show isn't free, 99% of the time they have it available for purchase, so I can still watch it. If Netflix doesn't have a movie or TV show, there's no recourse within Netflix, I have to go to another site or open a different app.

Also, to me Amazon's Transparent was on par in quality with Netflix's originals. I don't really use Amazon for their original content at the moment though.

I highly recommend Red Oaks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcGIvQJhbSY

(And view offline is a killer feature.)

I feel the opposite. Aside from original content, it "feels" that amazon has everything netflix has (at least for what I care about) + the option to see newer movies for a fair price (though I hate the games they're playing with burying the prices in submenus). Netflix has become my 2nd goto place after Amazon when I'm browsing for something to watch.

The trade-off is going to be different for different people.

If being able to take movies with you on your commute or on the plane is important, it doesn't matter if Netflix's UI is better since it isn't even accessible.

If on the other hand, you are mainly interested in streaming at home or where you have Wi-Fi, you could debate the merits of Netflix UI vs. Amazon UI.

Amazon has found a way to make any advantages Netflix has irrelevant for some set of users and some scenarios. And it looks like it is hard for Netflix to follow. The question is whether it will drive enough trial and adoption for Amazon.

> Amazon originals are a torture chamber

Man In The High Castle is an amazing[1] series. Transparent was pretty good. Shaun the Sheep. Orphan Black.

[1] Amazing.

Shaun the Sheep isn't an Amazon original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_the_Sheep

It looks like I was thrown off by the "Amazon Original Special" for The Farmer's Llamas.

Orphan Black is great, but it isn't produced by Amazon.

Shaun the Sheep and Orphan Black are BBC shows.

>Amazon originals are a torture chamber, I cant even name one.

Transparent was pretty good, gut nowhere as good as 'making of a murderer'.

No one mentioned "Alpha House" with John Goodman & Clark Johnson. Of all the prime original series, it was my favorite.

oh Man, that show was brilliant. I am eagerly waiting for the next season.

The lack of support for Chromecast/Android TV is the big killer for Amazon Prime video in my book.

Also the shady practice of removing alternatives to the Fire TV Stick from the Amazon store leaves a pretty bad taste as well.

Also the shady practice of removing alternatives to the Fire TV Stick from the Amazon store leaves a pretty bad taste as well.

Just searched last night and easily found the Roku stick (whatever it's called).

They removed the Chromecast and Apple TV from their store because they "don't support" Amazon Video. Ignoring that it's up to them whether or not to support the devices.

Search for chromecast or apple tv.

Amazon isn't worried about you buying another stick, they are worried about you buying into a competitor's ecosystem.

Chromecast users are less like to use amazon video than prime stick customers

Apple TV users are more likely to use itunes for media than prime stick users.

Roku it at least agnostic about ecosystem, compared to apple tv and chromecast.

They stopped selling Chromecast on Amazon, I believe.

And Apple TV.

I was actually using Amazon Prime Video[1] more than Netflix until I got Apple TV. Where everything seems to exist except for Amazon.

[1] Largely due to the fact you can rent/buy newer movies. Now I just do that with iTunes. But I would've just stuck with Amazon Prime if they were on Apple TV.

I'll wait until the numbers start to roll in for the outflanking. I'm not convinced that offline is the same killer feature for videos that it is for music. I'd argue that most people streaming movies do it on large format devices which are more likely to be connected to wifi. Amazon's original content compared to Netflix is largely a joke. Most of the shows have extremely low budgets and you can tell. This situation seems to be improving, but Netflix hasn't stagnated either. The UI for amazon devices is also significantly worse than netflix. I have amazon prime for shipping but would rather pay extra to use netflix's ui.

Offline support is a huge feature for me, since I have a long train commute twice a week. I do the vast majority of my TV watching during train journeys, my only annoyance on that front is the licenses that Amazon have mean some shows are only downloadable if you've "bought" them.

As for UI, I'll concede that the web UI is awful, however the Fire TV is fantastic when you're primarily watching content from Amazon and the same is true with the Kindle Fire tablets. Having said that, the only reason I have a Kindle Fire is because it was super cheap a year or so back, its a great piece of hardware hogtied by Amazon's insistence on using their own fork of Android.

Relevant but not Amazon Prime - I looked everywhere for somewhere I could legally download Star Wars in HD to watch on a plane. But since my Surface Book apparently doesn't support HDCP, I couldn't. The best I could do was SD from the iTunes store. Eventually, I just paid the $20 somewhere, then torrented it in HD. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should be completely impossible in 2016.

I see that Amazon Prime offline is only supported for Android and iOS, and I bet spotty HDCP support on laptops is part of that.

Are you seriously unable to view HD iTunes/Vudu/etc videos natively on your surface book? That seems crazy to me

I can stream the videos, but not download to watch offline- I should have been more clear.

If you have a Surface Book, I would assume that Xbox Video (Microsoft's a la carte video offering) would have the best support for the device. Although it's stupid that a device that high-end doesn't have HDCP set up properly when it's shipped from the factory.

This article seems to have missed that Amazon sucks and Netflix doesn't. How much of Amazon's content do I really get without paying an additional rental cost or fee? It's become quite annoying to even try to look through Amazon's library. We really enjoy Netflix, but from Prime; I mostly just want free shipping. * I don't usually post such vagrant "Opinion", but this article is making assumptions about consumer opinion that purports to represent fact.

Has this guy ever looked at what is actually available for Download on Amazon Video? Everything that is available on Amazon Video is NOT available for download.

During our Holiday road trip, I was excited to use this feature but all that was available was utter trash.

It may be a nice "feature" but if all that is available is outdated 80's movies, its not going to do a lick of good.

This article wants to frame the bunfight in terms of tech. "Streaming vs offline". Actually it's more about incumbent vs challenger. Challenger spends more money doing something different (offline access) but the actual tech difference is incidental. The key issue is that Amazon is having to work harder. If it wasn't the tech differentiator, it would be spending more on content which arguably, it is (also) currently doing.

This really is a story of number 2 needs to spend more money to provide a better service, to catch up and take over number one. It's not really a story about streaming vs offline. It's just business 101 - significantly better service (however achieved) to offset inherent leader advantage.

That said, this whole thing is beautiful for the consumer. Leading player cannot get lazy, deep-pocketed challenger innovates to improve customer experience. Long may it last!

Offline viewing is definitely a cool feature, but for me, and I imagine many English people, it was the fact that Amazon signed the guys from Top Gear

The Top Gear thing was a very stupid move that will cost BBC millions.

Top Gear was a very popular TV show and BBC sold licenses around the world.

On the other hand, Clarkson assaulted a member of the production crew because the hotel he was at didn't have hot food. It's plainly obvious that he should (and was) have been fired for that - had they not it kickback would give the BBC much bigger problems.

The Top Gear brand is still owned by the BBC and they're rebooting it with a new set of presenters, so Top Gear is far from over yet.

I'm actually pissed that Amazon agreed to 'buy' 'Top Gear' and that Netflix was interested.

Clarkson should not be rewarded with more freedom and money after punching a staff member over some little thing.

He's not being rewarded for punching a person, he is being rewarded for being highly entertaining.

He got punished for punching a person (he was fired). Perhaps you think he should have received more punishment and that is valid, but he received no reward for attacking a person. He could have made the same move without getting fired first, and it would have probably been much easier.

It's not a direct reward, you're right.

But in many ways his life doesn't seem worse off than it was before he punched the guy. In some ways it might be better. And I see those enabling this and paying him more as somewhat complicit and scuzzy.

The fact that they employed Clarkson is one of the numerous reasons I'm extremely unlikely to ever subscribe to Prime.

Not because Amazon sold it with prime, a product many people already "used" and loved?

There is a lot wrong with this article, but here's the main one that I think the author missed:

The quote there from Netflix's Chief Product Officer is the most important part -- by offering offline downloads, Amazon is severely limiting themselves as to what devices they can offer their service on.

You can't offer offline downloads on a Nintendo DS, because it doesn't have the storage (but you can stream Netflix on it). You can't have offline download on a cable box (but there are a whole bunch you can stream Netflix on).

And what happens when I want to download something offline for my iPad but it's full? I can still stream Netflix (or Amazon Video) but I can't save it for later. Or they could offer streaming but not offline mode on those devices. What a terrible user experience.

I don't think this will end up being that big a deal anyway -- most use cases I've heard for offline Netflix are I want to watch on a plane or cruise ship or hotel. Open Connect[0] boxes can be put on planes and cruise ships, and most hotels have wifi already and some are already testing [1] the ability to let you log into your Netflix account from the hotel room.

[0] https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com

[1] http://www.macnn.com/articles/15/01/20/test.allows.marriott....

Am I missing something? What's forcing Amazon to offer this on all devices that can stream Amazon Video? On your phone, on your computer, on a device with built-in storage it'll be available, anywhere else it's the same streaming you've always had.

Nothing forces them to do it, but it offers a fractured and confusing user experience. There are other comments in this thread about how it's annoying that some content is free and some paid. Now add offline yes/no, and you've doubled the possibilities for every piece of content. And better yet, offline yes/no on this device and you double the possibilities for every device you personally own.

Does anyone know whether Netflix should be concerned with the data Amazon acquires from streaming Netflix videos on its machines, potentially allowing Amazon to use this information for competitive business intelligence? Or are there safeguards in place to prevent this from happening?

First, the actual video content itself does not, as far as I know, stream from AWS. If you watch in the web player you can see the many requests going out to Netflix's CDN. Given that the website is served up over HTTPS, Amazon doesn't actually have data as to which videos Netflix users are streaming (I believe Netflix's CDN and ISP/edge relationships are independent of AWS).

Second, even if they could, it would be an appalling breech of customer trust for Amazon to take advantage of that ability. I do not believe that sort of behavior to be within Amazon's company character (I worked there prior to joining Google).

Thanks - you've given me a good jumping off point to learn more about this!

There should be safeguards to prevent this from happening to avoid being sued. To what extent said safeguards are followed is a separate issue.

Although, given that Netflix has now launched all over the world, thus implying they've secured content deals for global distribution (which is one of the harder and more valuable competitive differentiators), they may be considering at some point to move to their own datacenters. I understood that once you get big enough, it's cheaper to roll your own bare metal infrastructure (whether you cloudify it or not) rather than rent.

Thanks!

As long as Amazon doesn't allow support for 3rd party devices they aren't "outflanking" anyone. I can watch Netflix on Apple TV, Chromecast, etc, etc. I can watch amazon videos on... amazon devices.

Etc. etc.? You named the only two devices I can think of that it doesn't work with. And all indicators point to it being Apple and Google refusing to play ball.

They have 3rd party devices, I watch Amazon on my PS3.

I'm surprised there's enough of a market for this to make the engineering investment worthwhile, to be honest. I can't remember the last time in the last 10 years that I was in a situation where I wanted to watch a video and didn't have connectivity. Of course, people torrent media and sometimes even purchase it offline, but not usually because they have limited connectivity -- rather, because they either cannot find a suitable streaming option or they prefer viewing 1080p video without all the layers of lossy compression.

So you never fly on a plane then...? Because I do that every month, and streaming a movie just isn't an option.

The offline viewing problem is one that will solve itself soon enough as bandwidth gets more plentiful and ubiquitous, and as the infrastructure improves. It's a nice feature for now, though.

The killer app for Amazon, for some people anyway, is the huge library of free quality kids programming. Offline viewing is a very nice plus for that use case and likely would be even in a highly-networked world.

I think very few users care about "downloading" or "owning" video content. They like to convenience of streaming's instant availability from any device have. And how often do you re-watch the same movie or show? I do think people would appreciate caching to allow "offline streaming" to watch movies on, say, an airplane without paying for Wi-Fi.

I don't watch much TV, and already have an Amazon account, so for me that's one less thing to keep track of.

If anyone from Amazon is reading this - add support for chromecast.

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