Is amazon video their biggest competitor? I’d have thought that Hulu, HBO Go, iTunes and other streaming services might be more popular than Amazon Video. I have no data to back that up though.
ps: given that Amazon Video is available for all prime members, we can’t compare total number of subscribers. Hours of videos watched per day might be a better number to look at.
Amazon is definitely Netflix's biggest competitor when comparing who's spending the most on original content in streaming. They're also a major competitor when it comes to bidding for exclusive rights but there are many participants in that fight, including cable plus companies like Disney setting up their own streaming service.
It would be an enormous risk for any cloud provider to attempt to degrade the use of their platform or snoop on how it's used by a company who is a competitor in another area, be it streaming or code management.
Correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't Netflix run their billing / search / recommendation /... systems on AWS and their whole video content streaming are engineered / hosted internally in collaboration with ISPs?
ps: given that Amazon Video is available for all prime members, we can’t compare total number of subscribers. Hours of videos watched per day might be a better number to look at.