Fresh off its Academy Award wins, Amazon announced that it is interested in potential deals for streaming content through cable boxes, according to Bloomberg Technology.
“Amazon is definitely open to those partnerships, and to be fair, we haven’t done as much there as Netflix have done,” Alex Green, managing director of Amazon Video, said Thursday at the Cable Congress conference in Brussels.
The increasing popularity of streaming services like Amazon, Netflix and YouTube has led some to believe that consumers will eventually ditch their cable boxes altogether. Amazon just won two Oscars, for Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman, and has become serious competition for pay-TV providers and video game companies with its growing content. But Green believes there is room for everyone.
“Amazon, Netflix, other OTT services can easily co-exist with the cable industry, with pay TV, as we do already,” Green said. “The overlaps are very high between subscribers to high-value pay-TV packages and to subscribers of Netflix and Amazon and other SVOD services.”
One potential partner for Amazon could be Liberty Global. The London-based company already offers more than 100 applications in Europe, including Netflix, YouTube and Videoland. Last year, it agreed to expand a deal with Netflix to bring the streaming service to its other markets and is considering offering Amazon Prime to its subscribers. Liberty believes that its deal with Netflix has helped it retain its customer base.
“We would partner with almost anybody, but our interests have to be aligned,” Balan Nair, chief technology and innovation officer for Liberty, said at the conference. “When our interests and Amazon’s interests are aligned, you’ll see them on it, but at this point there’s a reason they’re not on our box.”
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