Amazon has aggressively grown its Prime Instant Videos service over the past year, more than tripling the amount of content available to subscribers since launch. And as Amazon continues to add more content to Prime Instant Video, there have been speculations that it could introduce a service not tied to its Amazon Prime offering. But that’s probably not in the cards — at least not in the near term — according to the company’s top video content acquisition exec.

Today, access to its streaming video service comes bundled with Amazon Prime. But some rumors have emerged lately, suggesting that Amazon could unbundle the service and offer it as a standalone competitor to Netflix or Hulu Plus. That includes a mention from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who wrote in a letter to shareholders that he expects Amazon to introduce the service and price it below Netflix’s own offering.

But Brad Beale, Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition at Amazon, said in an interview Wednesday that the company is unlikely to break out the video subscription offering anytime soon. “The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers,” Beale said. “The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today — we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future.”

Even before adding the video component, Beale said that Prime was an incredible value. The offering provides free, two-day shipping to customers who pay an annual subscription. We’ve believed for a while that adding video could entice some customers to sign up for Amazon Prime who might otherwise not have — and once they’ve paid the annual subscription fee, they’re likely to take advantage of the free shipping. In that sense, video could be seen as a loss leader for driving more physical retail sales.

There’s also the fact that having a free subscription service could help boost transactional sales through Amazon’s VOD and electronic sell-through offering. While Prime Instant Video has 15,000 titles for free viewing, it doesn’t have many of the latest new release films or in-season TV episodes. For newer content, Amazon offers more than 100,000 titles for rental or purchase. So an Amazon user who got hooked on older seasons of Downton Abbey or Sons of Anarchy on the free service might convert to being a paid user to watch the current seasons of those shows.

As Amazon adds content, it’s also looking to boost awareness of what’s available on the service. That includes placement of a letter from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the site’s homepage, letting the millions of users who stop by every day know what new content is available from Amazon Prime. That kind of promotion is driving awareness and usage, Beale told me. As more customers learn what’s available, and as Amazon continues to improve the offering with even more content, he expects customer adoption to grow even more.

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Screenshot of Foodie (click to enlarge)

Glam Media, the online media company that produces content and serves ads for a primarily female audience, on Thursday is launching a new website, Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. Social networking features will be built into the new Foodie website, making it the first site from Glam that deeply incorporates the technology acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011.

A launch with great expectations

In an interview this week, Glam CEO Samir Arora said he expects Foodie to very soon become one of his company’s top most highly trafficked sites. “One year ago, we discovered that our top ad category in revenue during the first quarter of 2011 was food. We didn’t even have a dedicated food category at that time,” Arora said. “That really drove us to sequence Foodie as an important launch.” Glam expects Foodie.com to attract 10 million monthly uniques soon after it debuts — a very impressive draw by most standards.

At launch, Foodie will feature content from prominent chefs, restauranteurs, established food critics and bloggers, and ads from companies including Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia. The real key news about the site, though, is that readers of Foodie will be able to fill out complete social profiles to let them interact with each other and Foodie’s content creators and brands. Glam describes Foodie.com like this: “A full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.”

Still an appetite for social media

But will people really want to create yet another social media profile? Glam certainly thinks so. According to CEO Arora, that’s because sites like Facebook are just too general to help us connect with our individual interests like food. The people with whom you’re friends on Facebook may not be the same people with whom you’re interested in sharing recipes. “When I connected my Facebook graph to my Yelp account, I found that I have nothing in common with my friends in terms of our restaurant tastes,” he said.

It’s a fair point — as popular as general social networking sites have become, people still go to specialized content producing sites on the web. Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph is trying to turn Facebook into a central place where people can customize their ideal web experience content and all, but perhaps people will still want to keep separate online niches where they deal with people who align with them along very specific interests. Foodie.com wants to be the place people go to read and connect with like-minded people about all things culinary.

Food may be just the beginning

Arora said this push toward social was always the direction in which Glam planned to go, and that the Ning acquisition which closed in December accelerated the process. “Otherwise, if we had to build it ourselves, we’d probably take five years.” If Foodie is a success it’s expected by the company to be, other verticals in Glam’s portfolio could go the social route as well.

It’s an ambitious move to make, but Glam already has such a massive audience — 220 million unique visitors a month, 90 million of them in the United States — that if anyone besides Facebook is going to turn itself into a totally social content web destination, it’s them.

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convert MOV to WMV

E book readers have stormed the market because the launch of the popular wildly Amazon Kindle. Initially the Kindle was bought out and Amazon was not in a position to keep up with the demand for the brand new gadget. Since the debut of the Kindle there are quite a few new e-book readers on the market. And more ebook readers are nearly to return out. The popularity of these devices is only increasing. What may the world of e-book readers seem like in the near future? Here are some predictions about e book readers for the near future.

We will see widespread and commonplace formats.

One factor which may happen with these readers is a typical format. This might be a common format to work on all ebook readers. This shall be vital because authors and publishers will want to have a format where they can promote to all of the hundreds of thousands of ebook reader homeowners versus just a small subset of the market for just one reader. Corporations like Amazon may be unwilling to undertake this at first. In spite of everything, if they will management the format, they have far more management over pricing. However we expect it is certain to occur especially if Amazon can sell to tens of millions of non-Kindle readers.

Varied book firms will type unique contracts with publishing companies.

One other actuality is an unique contract. A write might just publish for one system and one system only. If the author is popular enough and the incentive is high enough, this might happen. Again, this offers a level of management of business choices and pricing. When Apple created a whole music library with iTunes after which controlled distribution of the music, they instantly had the higher hand. Publishers don’t need the same thing to occur to books. They need to control distribution.

There shall be digital media with printed books.

As these new reader units develop into more widespread, many printed ebook purchases may also give you access to the downloadable e book reader model of the e book as well. This would nonetheless give printed books dominance while giving those that have e-book readers cause to exit and shop for real books. DVDs at the moment are doing this model the place you get the physical product, the DVD, in addition to the digital copy. We think that the nice old paper guide just isn’t going to disappear anytime too soon. But, like with so many nice shifts, we do think that increasingly more paper books might want to share the market with digital books.

Digital textbooks will enter the market.

It is solely a matter of time that expensive textbooks begin changing into ebooks. Faculties will want these readers for their first 12 months college students to have the ability to place textbook and homework material on them. These may turn into a part of many classrooms. Like with many know-how advances, the younger generations will embrace the change first.

We expect that ebooks are here to stay. They will not take over completely any time soon, but they will play an increasingly vital function within the distribution of information.

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Apple’s iPhone 4S has helped it regain ground lost to Android in consumer smartphone market share, but it’s also having a very positive effect on enterprise adoption, according to a new report. The iPad also remains virtually the only choice when it comes to tablets in business.

Enterprise mobile security provider Good Technology on Wednesday released its quarterly data data report for the fourth quarter of 2011. The report detailed the progress of iOS and Android devices in enterprise activations among its customers, which include half of the companies on the Fortune 100, among others. Apple’s iPhone 4S was the big winner of the quarter, nabbing the top spot as the most-activated device, followed by the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 at Nos. 2 and 3, respectively.

Credit: Good Technology

The 4S represented 31 percent of all device activations counted during the quarter, nearly matching the total for all Android handsets, which accounted for 35 percent of all smartphone activations. Apple’s iPad 2 and iPad together accounted for 94 percent of all tablet activations.

Much like we’ve seen with new consumer device purchases, the release of Apple’s iPhone 4S in October began the reversal of a trend in which new Android activations were approaching Apple’s numbers, as you can see in the chart below. From October to December, Good saw a steady monthly increase in the percentage of iOS activations, matched by a decrease in Android device activations. Good says bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies likely had a strong impact on Apple’s enterprise success with the iPhone 4S.

Credit: Good Technology

A new phone from Apple was bound to incite a buying spree, but the numbers have remained strong in the months following launch. It’ll be interesting to see if the trend of growth continues, both in the consumer and enterprise markets, now that the 4S has been on the market for some time.

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Mike Isaac sat down with Android UX design chief Matias Duarte at CES for an exclusive pre-launch interview, and picked his brain about Android, design in general, and competing operating systems like Windows Phone and webOS ? the platform he architected for Palm years ago.

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The Samsung R760 has been tossed around as the likely model number of US Cellular’s upcoming Galaxy S II, and it’s just cleared one more hurdle: the FCC. While this doesn’t guarantee that the carrier will indeed get its own flavor of the GSII anytime soon, it’s just another piece of evidence to consider. For anyone hopeful that this could’ve become the Skyrocket or Galaxy S II LTE, we’re shooting down your dream — the FCC docs don’t indicate the presence of LTE, which means this will not be the mysterious smartphone slated to launch in April.

Samsung Galaxy S II for US Cellular clears FCC, lacks LTE originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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