Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
While Amazon has renewed Mr. & Mrs. Smith for a second season, the streamer has yet to announce whether co-stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine will return to reprise their roles as John and Jane.
Sauron (Charlie Vickers) was careful about keeping his true identity secret all throughout the first season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. But the dark lord’s powers are on full display in the series’ new season two teaser, and it seems like he’ll be laying waste to Middle-earth when we see him next. Show’s back on August 29th.
People sure seem to like Amazon’s adaptation of The Boys, and Amazon likes it when folks are watching its shows, which makes the news that the gritty superhero show has been renewed for a fifth season anything but a surprise.
[US About Amazon]
Batman: Caped Crusader jumping ship to Amazon Studios after the Warner Bros. Discovery merger made it seem like the project might never see the light of day. But the series now has an August 1st premiere date, and it seems like when the show drops, it will be introducing yet another new Harley Quinn riff.
The 13 percent year over year increase comes as AWS sales shot to $25 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s cloud division is now at a $100 billion annual revenue run rate — a sign companies are spending more on AI.
[ir.aboutamazon.com]
Sources tell The Wrap that the high costs stemmed from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s “chronic lateness,” along with inexperienced production execs:
“It should look like a $200 million-plus movie, but it doesn’t, because more than half goes to buyouts of the stars and the above the line,” the production insider said. “Amazon MGM have so many movies that nobody’s concentrating on what actually needs to get done. Given their volume, they can’t concentrate.”
The e-comm giant is betting you might. Shein, mostly known for its bargain bin fashion items, is now looking to sell more household items from established brands like Colgate-Palmolive or Hasbro. It’s part of a strategy to challenge Amazon as Shein looks to IPO later this year.
[The Business of Fashion]
Following a report by Puck’s John Ourand that ESPN has carved out a piece of the new NBA media landscape, The Athletic added an Amazon rumor:
It is expected that Prime Video’s package will include significant regular season and postseason games, perhaps even some conference finals. The anticipation is that the final contract will be for at least a decade and begin the 2025-2026 season.
If the deals go through, this might add streaming NBA games on Thursdays when Amazon’s NFL games aren’t on.
[The Athletic]
According to the WSJ, Amazon, YouTube, and Peacock are all in the mix alongside incumbents Warner and Disney, with the possibility of snagging global streaming rights for some games.
When these deals kick in after 2024-2025, they’ll exist alongside the three-headed effort from Disney, Fox, and WBD, standalone ESPN, Netflix and the WWE, the NBA’s FAST channel and who knows what else.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK has started gathering comments from third parties about the partnerships between Microsoft and Mistral AI, Amazon and Anthropic, and Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection AI staff. This is the first phase of gathering information to see whether these deals “fall within UK merger rules and the impact that these arrangements could have on competition in the UK.”
Production designer Howard Cummings talks glass houses, Red Rockets, and how Fallout became a verb.
People using Amazon’s AI library can check if an image was made with Amazon’s Titan Image Generator, which is now publicly available. Right now, the platform will only check Amazon’s own watermarks and not other developers.
Amazon also added the ability to customize guardrails and to bring people’s own models to Bedrock.
It’s very common for US-based studios to outsource big chunks of their animation projects overseas where production costs are significantly cheaper. Less common, though, are things like CNN’s report about production sketches from Amazon’s Invincible series and Max’s Iyanu: Child of Wonder show somehow winding up on a computer server located in North Korea.