Amazon Could Include Broadband In Prime Subscriptions

Amazon may be looking at offering its own Internet service to its customers directly, adding to its portfolio of online shopping, on demand video streaming and cloud infrastructure offerings.

The Information reported that according to a person briefed on the situation, Amazon is considering bundling its Prime video service with Internet access in order to make it more competitive with cable operators that already offer similar broadband and video packages.

Amazon priming for expansion

The report noted that Amazon would not build its own networks, but instead use those of other service providers as its backbone and then add its own Internet package on top. This is in contrast to Google and its Fiber broadband service, which has seen the search giant lay its own fibre network.

This would mean Amazon would need to purchase wholesale access to such networks, but then it would likely recoup those costs by offering enticing services at a scale that could undercut the costs of other Internet service providers (ISPs).

Given the UK has numerous ISPs working of the back of BT’s Openreach network, Amazon could set up its own Internet service with relative ease in the country, likely making it a good staging area for an expansion into Europe.

Equally, by offering its own Internet package Amazon would be able to encourage more adoption of its Prime video streaming services, helping it compete against the might of Netflix.

While Amazon has already demonstrated how it has evolved into a bone fide technology company as opposed to an online retailer with a few extra services, thanks to the dominance of its Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure offering, becoming an ISP as well may be a rather large step for the company.

However, as it currently stands, Amazon Internet service ambitions appear to only be at the high-level talks stage, so an Amazon-branded broadband package is not likely to crop up any time soon.

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