One interesting question is what will happen to the current clients of Kiva (of which many are competing with Amazon in ecommerce market) newegg. etc ??
If amazon wouldn't have offered EWS to netflix or have stopped offering it to netflix, netflix could have easily use some other cloud competitor. Maybe netflix would had to pay a bit more , but i don't think it would have been a big difference.
I don't know much about kiva but if their service is hard to replace and is a unique competitive advantage(and looking at the purchase price,it seems so), amazon would use this advantage.Amazon is known to play hardball.
Netflix actually can't switch to an AWS competitor at this point because none of them are big enough. (source is some random cloud infrastructure presentation they did)
When AWS started they were basically running off the "christmas season" and end-of-life amazon.com boxes with almost no up front expenditures. Everyone else in the "cloud" business is buying new boxes to build out, which means its really hard for them to get to scale or handle surge loads.
Weirdly, Amazon and Netflix fill different niches for me. Amazon's player is flash so it works for me in linux, so I use that when I'm on my computer. However Netflix has an application for my (non-Fire) android device, so I use that there.
I really wish they would start pushing on each other harder, so I could use only one for both...
What if Amazon were just positioning itself to do rebranded fulfillment? i.e. First Amazon equipment is sold to Target, etc. distribution centers; but you could spend more and have Amazon actually run the center; or you could have Amazon's distribution centers use your branded boxes and use their fulfillment centers.
Good question. I hope they keep innovating and serving all clients rather than it being a competitive advantage move for Amazon itself as an in-house robotics developer.
Netflix is one of the biggest user of EWS, yet, Amazon is pushing hard on their streaming service too.