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Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is eating the world. I can't wait until they start producing TV shows and movies like Netflix. The game is on.

They are attempting to produce movies and TV shows, though they're not having the creative or commercial success that Netflix has.

This may have something to do with motivation, and with the resources committed accordingly. Netflix is a TV and movie company, and it saw original content as a life-or-death strategic imperative. So it gladly spent $100M on "House of Cards," right off the bat. Amazon is a much larger, more diversified retailer, for whom TV and movies are but one small slice of a much bigger pie. Amazon hasn't taken this area as seriously as Netflix has, possibly because it doesn't consider the mission to be as central to its very existence. Its output, to date, has been fairly unimpressive and unambitious. ("Alpha House" and "Betas" have high-caliber casts and writing staffs, but word on the street is that the shows were ordered and rushed into production as a competitive answer to Netflix's recent successes.)

I quit watching Betas because I couldn't be bothered to wait a week between episodes.

I have mixed feeling about this. Although Amazon is one of my favorite companies with great customer service, I am asking myself whether the day will come where they'll eat up all the competition, make the cost of entry to any domain prohibitive (by negotiating great distribution deals for themselves -- deals that no one else can strike), and then raising the prices. Just to be clear: if Amazon can buy a pencil at 1c due to bulk orders, and everyone else can only get it at 3c (due to smaller volumes of sales), Amazon could sell it for 3c, make profit, and still not allow anyone else into the market. As a consumer, what do I care, right? I'm always getting the lowest price. But as an entrepreneur and someone who wants to see things get better, it's an issue if no one else can "disrupt" the market in a financially responsible way ( <-- and I'm specifically phrasing it this way because I think it's in mode these days to get a lot of VC money to "scale," and worry about profit later. I find it hard to believe that with just VC money anyone could "scale" to Amazon's dimensions).

Look at Walmart and see if your fears have come true.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not illegal to have a monopoly; it is illegal to have an abusive monopoly. If Amazon really does build a system where they truly can sell everything cheaper than the competition could even hope to, and then they do, well... great! That's a pretty big win for society in general.

If, on the other hand, they use their monopoly position to illegally crush everyone else, then raise prices until the next time they have to crush someone, you have an antitrust case. And note that there's already more than a whiff of accusations about the former going on, that they are using Amazon stock price to power a market domination move which they will then use to monopolize and extract rent. It's a bit hypothetical at the moment, but it's not as if nobody's looking for this to occur.

Amazon's stock price is, IMHO, pretty clearly predicated on the "crush all opposition than extract rent" model being what the market expects to see, incidentally. Stay tuned.

They've made at least one TV show called Betas (I do not recommend it)

Appropriately, they had Alphas before Betas came out.

CompleteMoron2: all your posts are dead. I don't know why. If you did not know this already, perhaps you know it now.

Sorry, I looked at it again and it's Alpha House. Alphas was a sci fi show.

> I can't wait until they start producing TV shows

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5379520/amazon-studios-the-...

Maybe you can... wait a little longer?

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