Both Variety and Red Herring report that Google Video Store, iTunes, and other video download services might have some new competition coming from Amazon.com sometime this Spring.
From Red Herring:
Amazon is in talks with various studios, such as Image Entertainment, Ardustry Home Entertainment, and First Look Entertainment, to get digital content for the service, the report said. It will launch the service with at least two major names as partners. ?They?re moving towards digital downloadable merchandise,? said Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with JupiterResearch, who?s heard talk about the service. ?This seems like a natural extension.?
From Variety
One supplier explained that an Amazon customer could stream a digital copy of a film for a fee and apply that charge as a credit toward the eventual purchase of the DVD. Another plan is for a customer to buy a DVD; while waiting for it to arrive, he could stream the content over his computer.
Amazon.com already offers some music downloads and recently a Bear Stearns analyst said that a Google Music service might be coming. I’ve also speculated on music as being a service that Google might offer. Yahoo already offers music downloads via Yahoo Music. Red Herring also has a story on a Google music download service.
Amazon.com has also said that they plan to offer a e-book download service partnering with Random House and other publishers. They already offer some e-books and documents for purchase and downloading.
Earlier this month we blogged about Google considering an e-book store
Finally, Amazon.com also offers their “Search Inside the Book” (SITB) program, now available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Canada and Japan that gives consumers the opportunity to keyword search book content and then view a pre-determined amount of that book online along with, in some cases, interesting stats. This post has some quotes from Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, on Search Inside the Book.
SITB is similar in many ways to what Google offers in partnership with publishers via Google Book Search (GBS).
Google’s Library Project (to digitize materials founnd in five large libraries and then offer snippets from that material) is a part of the complete GBS program.