AlexHopmann.com

Andy writes about how Amazon is going into the home grocery business similar to the WebVan/HomeGrocers of the past. I’m hoping this will be successful. I’m assuming this is also related to the same-day delivery thing that Amazon has been already offering in certain markets. If so they are well set up to have the critical mass necessary to make this sort of thing work. I’m hoping they pull it off- we order from Safeway sometimes for home delivery but I miss the level of service that Home Grocer used to provide.

I was chatting with some friends recently about buying TV on the Internet. It was on the way towards almost making sense not getting cable or messing with DVR and just getting the individual TV shows you want a-la-carte. With Unbox, iTunes, and the XBox video service you just download the shows you want, pay for each show, and enjoy.

Done right this should be a huge win for the TV networks. It seems like the only downside for them is that they lose the advantage of their wide distribution, but that is going to happen whether they play or not. The only stumbling block to make it more widespread is cost. At $2 for most TV shows whether they are 20 min (cut out the ads) or 40 minutes, high definition or not, its just not quite a no-brainer to watch everything online. If the Daily Show and Colbert Report were more like $1 per show and even better you could get a cheaper subscription I’d be there. But at $2 per show, that is 20nights/month X $4/night = $80/month. Sounds like the studios are being greedy. Here they have this opportunity to make some really solid revenue streams from their shows and get off the falling interruption advertising market.

And then the news today is that NBC is pulling out of iTunes because they want to charge $5 per show. Wacky and clueless. NBC was slow to put many of their shows on Amazon Unbox, but I see that Law and Order is up there now.

Hopefully they won’t jack it up to $5. Like I said, and $2 per HD episode, they have a great thing going and probably have ~$40/season extra revenue from me, especially if they do a better job posting the episodes right around when they go live. If they get greedy I’ll just continue to DVR it…