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.
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.
The company first rolled the semi-truck on-stage during a cloud computing event in 2016. It’s designed to get companies’ data into the cloud by transporting a 45-foot-long trailer full of hard drives to an Amazon data center.
But now, CNBC reports that Amazon has stopped offering Snowmobile’s service. A spokesperson tells CNBC that Amazon has “faster and easier” ways to transfer data to AWS.
None other than The Washington Post is holding Amazon to account for missing the mark on jobs produced at HQ2.
The company was supposed to add 2,500 new jobs at the site last year, but dropped 200 existing positions instead.
Amazon risks losing tax incentives, but insists its goal of creating 25,000 jobs by the end of this decade remains on track.
[The Washington Post]
This Vault-Tech number appeared in episode six of Prime Video’s Fallout adaption — and you can call it or text it for a nice little Easter egg.
Prime Video’s Fallout adaptation started streaming last night, but if you couldn’t get enough, Amazon has announced that it’s making Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition and Fallout: New Vegas available through Luna. You can play both games for free for the next six months. If you don’t use Amazon Luna, you can still get Fallout 76 for free with a Prime membership.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s GeForce Now is adding both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 to its lineup.
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It’s Fallout’s jokes, rather than its plot, that make it one of the most faithful — and best — video game adaptations.
Amazon’s latest software update lets Kindle users adjust the lock screen timeout interval — previously set to 10 minutes — so you don’t have to keep waking up your Kindle if you need to take a longer break.
The update also gives the ability to filter the content of Kindle libraries by subscription type and reading format.
The layoff comes after reports that the company is doing away with its Just Walk Out cashierless retail tech at its large format stores. GeekWire reports AWS VP Dilip Kumar cited the change in emails about the cuts internally.
As CNBC notes, Amazon has laid off more people since 2022 than at any point in its history. This year, that’s included Twitch and Amazon Health.
With its multibillion-dollar bet on Anthropic and its forthcoming Olympus model, Amazon is pushing hard to be a leader in AI.
Futurism reports that some Kindle users are seeing ads for AI-generated kids books, including clear ripoffs of existing classics. None of the books — including the laughably bad Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Haunted House — appear to be popular, though it’s unclear whether sellers manipulated Amazon’s algorithms or the retailer itself was involved.
Amazon has since removed the AI-generated books Futurism identified, with an Amazon spokesperson stating that all books “must adhere to our content guidelines, regardless of how the content was created.”
This comes as part of Amazon’s deal to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, starting with an initial $1.25 billion last September. Anthropic is the AI company behind the Claude 32 family of models, which the company claims outperforms ChatGPT and Google Gemini.