Site: Amazon.com/videoondemand
Category: Photo & Video
Amazon's Video on Demand is a cross-platform, video delivery service. Users can download videos from Amazon and watch them on a number of devices. Also, certain televisions and set-top boxes allow users to browse, purchase, and watch the videos without ever visiting Amazon.com.
Amazon's Video on Demand has both movies and television shows that can be purchased outright, or rented. Rentals only last 24 hours, but are usually less than a third the cost of purchasing the content.
(Credit:
CNET)
Site: Amazon.com
Category: Commerce
Amazon.com was one of the first online retailers in the world. It started out with books and now sells nearly every consumer good, including groceries and over-the-counter medicines. The service is well known as one of the best places to find new or used books at prices below what you'd pay in most retail stores. It also features free shipping on many of its items.
One of the things that makes Amazon.com dynamic as an online retailer is its community of users who write reviews and rate nearly every product on the service. Amazon.com is also transparent about which products are selling well in each category, which provides a secondary means for consumers to find out what's hot.
Since last year, Amazon has introduced an updated version of its Kindle eBook reader, along with a Kindle application for the iPhone. The company also began selling direct downloads for computer games through its Web storefront.
(Credit:
CNET)
Site: Amazon.com/MP3
Category: Audio & Music
Amazon's MP3 store sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bit rate and with digital copies of the cover art. Because there's no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon become one the top five music sellers worldwide.
Tracks are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to complete a purchase on the store, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.
(Credit:
CNET)
Site: Amazon Web Services
Category: Editors' Choice, Start-up's Friend
How can a bunch of kids in a garage create a Web service that half the people on the planet can use at once? By running their app on the cloud computing platform from Amazon Web Services instead of on their own servers.
Amazon Web Services, a collection of services include a computing engine, a database, and storage services, were created to be easy to provision (set up), and to scale as needed. The real benefit is that the developer doesn't pay for services delivered until they are. So if a site runs along at a few thousand hits a day it won't cost more than a few pennies to run. But a big spike coming from a Digg or Oprah link will automatically cause AWS to bring more resources to bear. The developer will be billed accordingly.
Web services a la carte
Venture capitalists, who fund startups, used to look askance at a Web company that couldn't run its own servers. Now we're hearing that they're considering financially irresponsible if they do. The cloud is where the new Web apps live.
Amazon's Unbox service, once the bane of our very own CNET reviewers, has come a long way. The service lets you download movies and TV shows to watch on your PC or portable device. Through a partnership with TiVo, you can also rent and watch the movies on your TV without a computer if you've got a compatible TiVo device hooked up to the Internet.
What makes the service especially cool is its RemoteLoad feature, which lets you buy and download a movie to another computer. It's a distinctly competitive advantage to systems that require users to be at the computer or device they intend to download, meaning you can start downloading a video to watch at home while still at work.
Winner: Amazon Unbox (Amazon.com)
Category: Video
Amazon S3 is Amazon Web Services' online storage service. Anyone can buy a nearly limitless amount of Web storage for pennies per GB. Many start-ups and Web services take advantage of S3's low prices and fairly stable uptime to take the place of having to host and store data themselves. While there have been a couple of hosting hiccups, it's remained up and running since its public launch in early 2006.
One of the things that makes S3 more attractive to start-ups and power users is that it ties in with other Amazon Web Services like the elastic computing cloud and its SimpleDB service. Using all three, start-ups can offload some of the tasks that usually required spending a large amount of money up front to do this work--saving them, and potentially their customers time and money.
Winner: Amazon S3 (Aws.Amazon.com)
Category: Utility
Amazon.com was one of the first online retailers in the world. It started out with books and now sells nearly every consumer good, including groceries and over-the-counter medicines. The service is well known as one of the best places to find new or used books at prices below what you'd pay in most retail stores. It also features free shipping on many of its items.
One of the things that makes Amazon.com dynamic as an online retailer is its community of users, who write reviews and rate nearly every product on the service. Amazon.com is also transparent about which products are selling well in each category, which provides a secondary means for consumers to find out what's hot.
Winner: Amazon (Amazon.com)
Category: Commerce
Amazon's MP3 store has had a banner year. The service sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bitrate and with digital copies of the cover art. The service offers over 2 million tracks that are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to download albums, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.
Because there's no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon jump to within the top five music sellers worldwide. Also, starting in January, Amazon signed a deal with Sony BMG that gave the music store access to all four major record labels, bringing it up to spec with its competitor, Apple's iTunes.
Winner: Amazon MP3 (AmazonMP3.com)
Category: Audio
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Category: Productivity
Amazon.com was one of the first online retailers in the world. It started out with books and now sells nearly every consumer good, including groceries and over-the-counter medicines. The service is well known as one of the best places to find new or used books at prices below what you'd pay in most retail stores. It also features free shipping on many of its items.
One of the things that makes Amazon.com dynamic as an online retailer is its community of users, who write reviews and rate nearly every product on the service. Amazon.com is also transparent about which products are selling well in each category, which provides a secondary means for consumers to find out what's hot.
In addition to its retail commerce, Amazon also offers a service called S3, which provides large amounts of online storage at very low fees. While aimed at developers, S3 is used by many small and large businesses for its "pay-as-you-go" fee structure.
Web site: amazon.com
Webware coverage: Amazon to offer DRM-free music downloads; A hands-on look at Amazon Unbox on TiVo; Bezos: Amazon Web Services will be 'meaningful business'
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