Remember the old days of the free “TV Guide”-style inserts in the Sunday paper that provided you all of the programming content choices available to you for the week? With Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle Fire, I just wonder is the Amazon Kindle Fire any different?
Okay, there are a few differences:
- TV guides were typically weekly…the Kindle Fire has no time structure.
- TV guides provided the when and where you could consume content…Amazon’s Kindle Fire lets you consume content anywhere at anytime (but this is true for nearly every internet connected media device available today)
- TV guides provided one medium – television…theKindle Fire offers television shows, movies, music, books, apps and more…
But, fundamentally and functionally, they are one in the same….
- TV guides listed available content to enjoy…the Kindle Fire UI does the same thing
- TV guides were all about consumption…so is the Kindle Fire…
- TV guides promoted content publishers/advertisers wanted you to consume…so does the Kindle Fire…
- TV guides were included with your newspaper subscription…it’s only a matter of time before the Kindle Fire is available with an Amazon Premium account (see this post on ZD Net titled “Will tablets soon be free? Let’s start with the Kindle Fire”)
Oh…sorry, one more major difference…the free television guides did not directly make any money on the content you ended up consuming…Amazon hopes to make millions. And that my friends is what makes this story less about the tablet (the TV guides), and more about the content. In marketing there is the phrase “content is king”. I think when it comes to the Kindle Fire Amazon is thinking the same thing.
- 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books (Content!)
- Amazon Appstore – thousands of popular apps and games (Content!)
- Free cloud storage for all your Amazon content (Content!)
- Amazon Prime members enjoy unlimited, instant streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows (Content!)
It will be interesting to watch how the tablet device evolves…pure consumption (Amazon) vs consumption + creation (iPad)
Who are you betting on?
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Is there anyone out there in the blogosphere that understands there are more tablets in this world than the iPad? In two short years the world will be filled with win8 mobile devices in quantities that Apple can only dream about. In the meantime every other major electronics manufacturer (as well as every minor one) is producing tablets- alot of them Android, some of them good, some sorta meh- but these are different folks than Apple. The iPad really isn’t much of a content creation tool- unless you think your iPhone is also a killer content creation tool… The full blown OSes that are arriving on tablets will make the iPad appear to be the expensive viewmaster that it is.