OT: Amazon wins rights to stream Thursday Night Football
SIAP. Another development for cord cutters. Amazon has outbid Twitter for streaming Thursday Night Football. Stories like this will likely become more frequent over the next few years. Relevant details:
- Only Amazon Prime members can watch through Amazon
- Included with Amazon Prime membership
- Amazon paid $50,000,000 for the rights
- Also in talks with MLB and NBA, though no definite news there
I was actually really impressed with how good the quality of the twitter streams were last year. I'm sure Amazon will be able to pick up where they left off.
Glad the NFL does this, give cord cutters a legal way to stream and they gladly will.
about Amazon in general. On the one hand, I am a prime member and enjoy the convenience and overall shopping experience. On the other hand I am terrified for what the entity as a whole means for the future of brick and mortar retail and American jobs in general. I increasingly find myself looking for excuses to not use Amazon and go to a traditional retailer instead.
On the other side of the coin, the increase in Prime shipping and Amazon's courier service means they're opening up facilities all over the place. Ergo, new jobs. It's not a perfect system, and I'm all about brick-and-mortar, but Amazon is a job-creator, too.
I have no idea what the actual numbers are (I am sure they exist, I just don't know where), but I'll bet the ratio of jobs gained vs. lost by Amazon expansion is not particularly good for overall employment, maybe something like 1/10 (a total guess)? It won't be now - because we're Americans, and we wait until the problem is a crisis before we do anything about it - but someday we're going to have to deal with the effects of technology and automation on employment. Can anyone say, Universal Basic Income???
Universal Basic Income
You obviously can WRITE it, but can you SAY it? And if no one is there to hear it when you do, did it ever really happen???
Ah yes, the classic quantum UBI conundrum
Semper ubi sub ubi.
Not to mention a lot of Amazon labor is filled by contractors who receive little or no benefits
They're currently in a class action suit for forcing their warehouse employees to work off the clock.
I do buy a lot of things from there, but only when the discount v's a local retail store is substantial, say 20-25%.
My son's TV died the other night so I started looking for a replacement. Amazingly, the one I decided on was cheapest at Best Buy of all places. I haven't shopped there in years.
amazon. in fact, at a meeting last year in detroit the amazon people had with michigan/midwestern wholesalers the amazon people literally had to cut the meeting short and leave.
to give you an idea of what amazon was doing, they would bid to be the actual shipper for the various wholesalers. understand that the wholesalers accounts are graded and if they fall below standard, amazon suspends their accounts and holds all their money. so get this: amazon was failing to ship, the wholesalers were getting dinged by customer complaints, amazon would freeze their accounts and seize their money ---- and it was amazon's fault because they were screwing up the shipping!
to make it even better, it will take literally months to break through their electronic fence to talk with someone who can undo the problem. i avoid doing business with amazon, and that is why.
It sounds like they're using the Google business model for dealing with customers and vendors.
Basically, we're the biggest player in town so fuck you.
and hit the nail right on the head. amazon could care less, the wholesalers have no other worthwhile platform to use, there's no place left to go!
Which is pretty much par for the course in retail (sans Costco and a few others who cater to an affluent clientele and have the margin X volume to be able to afford it.)
Ask them what the yearly turnover percentage is for skilled workers...I'd be curious to hear how they answer.
Here's some actual numbers for you, then:
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20161220/NEWS/161229995/amazon-to-…
A quick skim of the article leads me to believe, like Obi Wan once said, "these are not the numbers we are looking for..."
How about something that tells us, "Amazon plans to add X jobs (5000, 10,000?) to a unit that will work on fully automating the check-out process from every retailer in American, putting 3 million cashiers out of work over the next decade"?
Adapt or die. Or should we go around destroying all the printers and priting presses out there Office Space style so we can employ more folks as scribes?
As someone tied to urban planning, even if you could acheive a one-to-one ratio between jobs lost in brick and mortar local businesses to Amazon-like, factory-style warehouses, the impact is huge on local communities and society in general. The loss of community vibrancy through the degredation of human interaction shouldn't be overlooked, much like how twitter and facebook has replaced face to face communication. Advances in technology, which are meant to make our life easier, will further isolate each one of us in the world, at a time when members of society are having an increasingly harder time relating with one another.
Now whether you believe we as a society have much power to dictate societal evolution through shifts in technology and other sectors is a whole other matter. It seems that the path of least resistance has always won out in the long run.
Annnnndddddd you lost me. I mean, have you ever really "interacted" with other "humans" before? My God, do they SUCK! Honest to God, they're completely insufferable... ;-)
Yeah, now that you mention it, Netflix has been my best friend as of late. I should probably focus on that for a while, haha.
I could not agree with you more!!!!
If you've been drinking, please stop. If you're sober, please start drinking.
Cmon think of all the jobs Amazon (and Domino's Pizza) are gonna create for DRONES in the future. If you're a drone, you're gonna be able to pull down the Big G's. You'll be like all the rage.
Humans, well, notsomuch, you had your time.
Will the Domino's pizza delivery drones have Spartan and Buckeye logos on them still? I mean, I'm all for technological advancement, but some things are sacrosanct...
1 for 1. If amazon is cheaper and saves people money, they means they have more disposable income to spend which should benefit the economy overall
never straight forward as 1 for 1 and often filled with lurking variables.
There is an Amazon fulfillment center in the Twin Cities that was built within the last couple of years that employs around 2,500 people. They are constantly hiring and cannot find enough applicants to keep up with the hiring demand.
paying people enough. Raise the pay and those jobs will be filled.
Probably, but I would think they are offering wages similar to that of retail jobs.
... I have never worked in the retail arm, but do have to defend the company somewhat. In fact, not even the company, but technological advancement. Technology has been putting people out of jobs for centuries. If it wasn't Bezos, it would be some other person. if you build a better mouse trap, people will use it. What that means at the macro scale is worth contemplating (like UBI), but the problem is much older and widespread than Amazon. To not shop at Amazon in order to reduce the pace of this phenomenon is a Sisyphean undertaking.
Actually has it's own wiki page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment
remember a random stat from a HS business class that was along the lines of: 1/2 of all people work in an industry that wasn't around when they were born.
So agree with you advancement is the norm, but the rate at which change is happening is increasing
As a former Amazon employee, I'll say this: working there has its challenges, but Amazon is dead serious about its "Customer Obsession" mantra. The company does well in part because it places the customer at the center of its universe. That may come at the expense of mom & pops and Amazon vendors, contractors, and suppliers who feel the squeeze under its heavy-handed negotiation tactics, but there is no company that is more committed to the customer than Amazon.
I wonder if this means that the cost of a Prime membership is going up? Nonetheless, my cord-cutting self likes this a lot.
No, they're bundling this into the $99 price of Prime membership. At least for this year anyways.
Quick math. Before the added $50 million cost a prime membership was $99.00. Increase cost means less profit, so yeah, it'll go up.
That's very, very poor math leaving out many, many variables. $50 million to Amazon is like the penny your drop on the dirty sidewalk and leave behind because you can't be bothered. Amazon is most likely to be the world's first* $1 trillion company.
*Not including Saudi Aramco, which shouldn't count...
Amazon's 2016 Revenue was $136,000,000,000
$50m is .000367%
So yeah, pretty much.
Eh, that's revenue. That's not profit. Meaning, that's the cost of goods going through them; of course it's super-high. But they are making only a small percentage off of that. Their 2016 net profit was just under $900M. So the NFL deal is actually quite a bit of a chunk of that.
Yeah I do understand the difference between profit/revenue.
I think they'll continue spending money towards Prime/Streaming, especially as most states now require Sales Tax to online orders.
Plus with the stranglehold and volume of distribution that they have, two day shipping doesn't cost as much as it used to for them.
Why should Aramco not count?
Because it's owned by a family and run by the largest political kleptocracy in the history of the planet?
Oh. Well, I didn't know that. I have never heard of that company until I read your post.
Free Thursday night football, will make people go to Amazon, and pay $99.00 for a prime membership to watch an inferior broadcast online?
Seriously.
I highly doubt people will pay $99 a year to watch sixteen crappy NFL games.
There are only 10 Thursday night games, but according to the info I read, they will get some Sunday games as well.