Both the television and film industries are racing toward streaming, with the narrative being that audiences are continuing to cut the cord when it comes to traditional cable packages, and increasingly pivoting to whatever allows them to watch their favorite programming the easiest way possible. But that’s not to say there still isn’t big money to be made on cable. HBO‘s revenues were just under $6 billion for 2016, and that’s actually an increase from the year before, so perhaps it’s not a big surprise that Amazon wants to get into that space.
The New York Post is reporting that online merchant turned award-winning original content creator are eyeballing a jump to the actual TV dial. “In a few years, you’ll see an Amazon channel like HBO,” a source told the paper. “We’re looking at being a global news and media company. There are key people working on it.”
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For a company that already has deep wells of data about what their customers buy and watch, it only makes sense for Amazon to pivot to another medium that allow them to gather even more intel about their users (and, of course, money, but a few billion dollars is a drop in the bucket for a company that does yearly net revenue of over $130 billion). Amazon wants to have tentacles in every part of your life, and this is one way to do it. Chasing Netflix is only one small aspect of bigger picture for Amazon, who already have a window into the premium cable world by seeing what people are ordering via their Amazon Channels program.
We’ll see how this plays out but it’s not completely unreasonable that this might happen. Maybe the next disruption the industry will face are streaming services jumping onto TV….