A report Thursday night from Bloomberg stated that Amazon has been testing Globalstar’s wireless satellite network in order to determine if it could build a wireless service of its own. This could be a pivotal moment for the company. Amazon’s video viewing audience has been growing at an amazing pace: it hit 38 million unique views in July, while the amount of time consumers spend watching Amazon videos has doubled in just six months. Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle Fire ranges have turned out to be substantial successes — they have basically killed off Barnes & Noble’s eBook and tablet product lines and are on their way to becoming the absolute eBook hegemon in North America with at least three new devices en route, according to exclusive BGR reports.
A wireless network of its own would give Amazon unprecedented control over content distribution. The company could soon be running its own wireless service beaming content to its own Kindle devices — some of it original Amazon productions, most of it videos and eBooks from a variety of sources. There is little doubt that Amazon’s ultimate goal is to kill off most book publishers and eventually publish a wide range of books by authors directly under contract with Amazon.
The ambition here is dazzling. Not since the heyday of RCA in the Roaring Twenties has one corporation has such soaring ambition in every step of the content creation and delivery chain.
