The Kindle Fire, from Amazon.com, is expected to be announced this Wednesday, September 28. The 7″ Android tablet is expected to cost $250 and include Amazon Prime, delivering Amazon’s movie and music services.
Apple has sold about 29 million iPads since its April 2010 launch and some analysts forecast the color Kindle could sell 3 million units in its first year.
Amazon and 20th Century Fox will soon provide instant streaming for TV shows like “24,” “The X-Files,” and “Arrested Development” and such movies as “Office Space” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, reports C/Net. The deal will bring the total number of “free” Prime instant videos to more than 11,000 movies and TV shows as Amazon continues its efforts to match up with Netflix in the digital streaming arena.
Big magazine publishers including Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith all have deals to sell digital versions of their titles on the Amazon tablet. Publishers will keep around 70 percent of all Amazon sales, and the retailer will share some customer data with the publishers.
Amazon Prime currently costs $79 a year and allows members to get free two-day shipping on many products Amazon sells.
Streaming competition is heating up;
- Netflix and DreamWorks Animation, have signed a licensing deal “replacing a less lucrative pact with HBO.” Netflix, on Sept. 18, abruptly split up the streaming and DVD by mail programs. About one million of its 25 million customers in the United States are believed to have dropped the service in this quarter. The company has lost half of its value — about $8 billion worth — over the last two months, says the NY Times.
- Dish Network has introduced a Netflix-style streaming service. Their new Blockbuster enhanced service on October 1st, is currently nothing more than a premium service for Dish subscribers. A streaming service for non-Dish subscribers is expected follow. Dish’s new streaming service called the Blockbuster Movie Pass will provide 3,000 movies streamed to the TV and 4,000 streamed to the PC. By comparison, Netflix has 20,000 titles available for instant streaming, while Amazon has 9,000 VOD videos through its Amazon Prime service.
- Comcast is working on a television streaming solution for iPads to compete with Cablevision and Time Warner. The product, called AnyPlay, allows Comcast subscribers to view live television on their iPad as long as it’s connected to their home network. Users must have a special Motorola box which sends it directly to the Xfinity TV iPad app over WiFi.
Competitors in the streaming video business now include Netflix, Hulu, Redbox, Amazon Instant Video, Apple TV, Google TV, Crackle TV and You Tube, among others.
The 7″ $249 Amazon tablet is suspected to have a TI dual-core OMAP chip, perhaps at 1.2 MHz. By contrast, the $199 7″ Lenovo tablet will feature a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen, a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
IDC predicts worldwide media tablet shipments for 2011 at 62.5 million units. That’s up from a previous projection of 53.5 million units. Apple has sold 29 million iPads in the device’s first 15 months. eReader shipments will reach a total of 27.0 million units for 2011, up from a previous projection of 16.2 million units, according to the data firm IDC. The original Kindle was introduced on Nov. 19, 2007, rather late in the holiday season. It immediately went out of stock for five months. Amazon has led the eReader market with a 51.7% share, followed by Barnes & Noble with 21.2%.
Any tablet that claims to be a mass market alternative for electronic newspapers, magazines and video, ought to first cut the cost of a $40/month 4G data plan.
