Amazon is no stranger to the Indian ecommerce market, investing huge amounts of money in their Indian operations. This is a company that isn’t looking for a return in the next year or so, but more a company looking at what’s possible 10 years down the line. The company faces fierce competition with the likes of Snapdeal and Flipkart, but it’s safe to say they have very deep pockets to keep pushing. Now, it looks like Amazon is to launch a music and video streaming service in India at some point in 2015, an area that Amazon is no stranger to elsewhere in the world. Services like Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Music offer users in the US and the UK huge amounts of content to access whenever they like.
The Economic Times of India is reporting that Amazon is looking to bring the same sort of service to India. Citing a number of executives, Amazon is said to have put Nitesh Kripalani, a man familiar with digital content thanks to his former position of VP at Multi Stream Media a company that deals with Sony entertainment in the region, in charge of securing the needed content. One executive is quoted as saying “We are working towards it… difficult to say by when as Nitesh has just been brought in… but he will soon start talks with content providers.”
It sounds like Kripalani is the right man for the job, and Amazon is a name that many content providers should see value in working with, but slow connection speeds will be a big obstacle to overcome. When talking about mobile, 3G is still very rare in many parts of India and without it, it would be extremely difficult to reliably stream the music and video content people want. Of course, a push by Amazon to offer such content using the internet could push ISPs and mobile networks to up their game when it comes to their speeds. How much the service will cost is unknown at this point, but we’re sure Amazon will be more than willing to compete on price.