Ever since I bought it, the Roku Netflix Player has been an integral part of my living room. Earlier this year, Roku added Amazon video…and now MLB.tv. But will Amazon convince people to pay for something available elsewhere for free?
Or will people rather pay for a monthy service such as Netflix?
The Roku player has a simple value proposition: subscribe to Netflix (I pay $15 a month), and you can watch an unlimited number of videos over the player, subject to availability. There is a small catch, which is that the downloaded video is often available later than the DVD, so quite a few titles aren’t available on the player.
Enter Amazon Video
I got a polite e-mail offering me $5 in credit for Amazon video, so I took the time to connect my Amazon.com account with my Roku player (a simple process), and I was up-and-running.
Then I started thinking about the nickels and dimes. After I paid $1.99 to watch 22 minutes (a half-hour program, minus the commercials) of a show clearly produced for a second-tier cable network. You know the show: 5 minutes of content, 17 minutes of re-playing the same 50 year old clips with voice-overs for the hook before the commercial and the introduction coming back from the commercial…all designed to keep you watching until 27 minutes past the hour when they go to commercial break, come back, finish up the show and go back to commercial.
It was — for lack of a better word — crap. Definitely not worth the spare change long lost between the cushions in the couch. Why would I pay hard-earned money for this?
And this is the question. Given a choice between a bundle of unknown value and a transaction with discrete value, people choose the bundle. Will I buy the third season of Brotherhood on Amazon video (I think ~$13 in SD and ~$20 in HD)? or will I string along individual episodes at $1.99 (SD)/$2.99 (HD)? or will I just wait for the DVD to come out next month on Netflix?
Whatever it is, I’ll definitely spend less than my neighbors with Pay TV.
Will Windowing Work In An On-Demand Future?
In this model of on-demand video, it’s clear that the long-established practice, of releasing new forms of distribution in disciplined time windows, will face new challenges. The prices for Internet video clearly must fall more closely into line with the bundled pricing in Pay TV services (even at a premium), but it looks like the alternatives are already there.
So with Amazon Video, I now have a way to jump the gun on the DVD release for both movies and television series from premium Pay TV networks. But I doubt I’ll pay for those horrendous cable programs that I would get for virtually nothing if I bothered with Pay TV. And I don’t know if I’m willing to make the leap away from Hulu for time-shifted broadcast programming.
This is a new way of consuming video, and assuming we can work the pricing out, I can see it becoming a regular part of my life. It definitely won’t replace Netflix or Hulu at this point, but never say never.