AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Red Herring
Amazon.com will launch a pay-per-view streaming movie service within weeks, founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said Wednesday.
Speaking at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California, Mr. Bezos was quoted by Barron’s as saying that he is “very serious” about the music and video download business.
Mr. Bezos offered no details on the [...]

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Tech Crunch
Shelfari, the Amazon-backed community networked around books, has introduced editable author profiles in hopes that it can become a destination for not only biographical information but interactions between authors and their fans as well.
Each author’s page will feature an open wiki in addition to a message board and a list of written books. Shelfari [...]

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BusinessWeek
The Web retailer is offering its vast computing power to corporations—and big names are starting to sign up
Jeff Bezos made a fortune building Amazon.com (AMZN) into one of the top players in online retailing. Now he’s looking for new ways to cash in on the company’s capabilities. One of the most intriguing, he thinks, is [...]

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Our Most Fulfilling Web Service Yet - Press Release
The Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS) allows merchants to tap in to Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and our expertise in logistics. Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a simple web service interface, fulfill orders for the products. [...]

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Think of an Old Film, And Chances Are Good You Can See It at Home - The Wall Street Journal
One way to measure the march of progress is to list the human needs that can now be obtained without leaving home. Heat, water, light: All can be produced on the premises with a flick of [...]

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Amazon’s IMDB Buys Indie Film Site Withoutabox - paidContent.org
The Internet Movie Database (IMDB), owned by Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN), has bought out the eight-year old indie movie distribution site Withoutabox. The financial details were not disclosed.
The Los Angeles-based film site was founded in 2000, and has a database of indie films worldwide. The site also filmmakers [...]

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Bruised music majors back iTunes rival - Financial Times
Next month’s Super Bowl will feature a sales promotion that is audacious even by that event’s over-inflated standards: Amazon.com, the largest online retailer, will offer as many as 1bn free downloads from its new digital music store in partnership with Pepsi and singer Justin Timberlake.
The promotion represents [...]

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Small Firms Tap Amazon’s Juice - The Wall Street Journal
Web-Services Unit Gains Popularity Renting Storage, Server Capacity
When Internet start-up Renkoo Inc. created a program called Booze Mail in June, its chief technology officer, Joyce Park, didn’t want to set the program up on the company’s main computer infrastructure. Instead, she signed up for Amazon.com Inc.
By [...]

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SEEKING ALPHA
Lots of talk last week about Amazon’s (AMZN) latest database-on-demand offering. Here’s some of what’s being said….
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The New Filmmaker/Festival Partnership - CinemaTech
Just got through moderating a really interesting panel on how film festivals can get more involved in distribution…interesting in that it exposed some truths and opportunities that I think are important for filmmakers and festivals.
Here at the International Film Festival Summit, the oft-repeated wisdom is that acquisitions executives only attend [...]

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