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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Check out this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the OK Go video seen during the Super Bowl, exclusive to Wired.

Wired Top Stories

Verizon and Redbox are creating a joint venture to provide movies on demand using the web as well as Redbox’s physical DVD rental kiosks around the country. The deal is seen as a blow against Netflix, which offers a DVD-by-mail and a streaming service, but it’s also a chance for Verizon to make money from streaming content and show off how awesome its fiber network is.

Details around the deal are limited, but here is what we know.

1. Verizon will own 65 percent of the joint venture while Coinstar, Redbox’s parent company, will own 35 percent.
2. The service will offer something Netflix currently doesn’t — a download option, which makes it more competitive with Amazon’s video offerings.
3. The offering will be available nationwide, not merely to Verizon customers.
4. Using Redbox helps the joint venture get access to new releases as content companies are trying to add more “windows” to the movie release process. Windowing is what content companies use to spread out the time between a movie released in theaters, when it hits rentals stores and when it makes its way to other services such as premium TV channels. The general thinking is this increases profits for each movie, but opinion is divided on that, and consumers hate it.
5. Verizon is counting on its existing relationship as a pay TV provider to get more content to the joint venture.
6. Whatever the end product looks like, it will launch in the second half of this year.

Given these facts, as scant as they are, it’s easy to see the threat to Netflix, as people could view the two offerings as fairly interchangeable as long as the pricing is competitive and the content is relatively equal. But without knowing about pricing or the content, the deal still has the potential to be a win for Verizon, given video is huge bandwidth suck on wireline and wireless networks. Netflix traffic was estimated to take up 20 percent of U.S. broadband traffic during peak hours according to Sandvine in the fall of 2010.

For Verizon, a streaming joint venture has three benefits. One, if it makes money from the service, that’s an additional revenue stream as well as a way to capture some value from its customers who cut the cord. Two, if the service can really deliver a video product that consumers love and will use, it will help drive traffic across Verizon’s networks. Customers in the FiOS areas will have a reason to sign up for the service if they haven’t already, while the joint venture will help drive traffic to mobile devices and other areas of the country. Verizon has a business selling bandwidth on 100 gigabit per second backbone pipes as well as leasing its fiber to cell phone providers to use as mobile backhaul.

Finally the joint venture gives Verizon a seat at the table with content companies as the industry tries to find new economic models based on the reality of an IP infrastructure that can deliver any content to anyone, anywhere. Sure, content companies are fighting the future with windowing and complicated rights agreements, while ISPs are trying to protect their business with broadband caps, but the future is coming, and Verizon is trying to get in on the ground floor rather than watch it pass it by.

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We’ve all been there: fire up a clip from YouTube or a movie on Netflix and things start out great. But, then, after just a few moments, that LTE connection starts to give up the ghost and suddenly you’re faced with unbearable stutturing or a video that just dies mid stream. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications are looking to solve that conundrum with DASH, or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. The idea is actually surprisingly simple — files of different sizes and qualities will be available depending on signal strength and network load, and the stream will be able to seamlessly switch between them as these variables change. While this sounds like a win for both consumer and carriers, we’re sure there are a few of you out there who just want the highest quality possible, even if that means waiting forever for that HD clip of the all accordion cover of Take On Me to buffer. Full PR is after the break.

Continue reading DASH promises stutter free streaming video over LTE, hopes you don’t care about quality

DASH promises stutter free streaming video over LTE, hopes you don’t care about quality originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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