Today Amazon.com Announces First Quarter Sales up 23% to $19.74 Billion. Amazon also announced that Prime Instant Video nearly tripled year over year.
Here are the Prime Instant Highlights from their press release.
- Amazon introduced Fire TV, a tiny box that plugs into your HDTV for easy and instant access to Netflix, Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, WatchESPN, Showtime Anytime, low-cost video rentals, and much more, offering an open ecosystem of over 200,000 movies and TV episodes. Fire TV also provides access to games from EA, Disney, Gameloft, Mojang, 2K, Amazon Game Studios, and more. The device offers voice search (that actually works!) to instantly find movies and TV shows, as well as the new ASAP feature which predicts the movies and TV episodes customers will want to watch and prepares them for playback.
- Amazon announced that HBO Go will become available for Fire TV, targeting a launch by year-end.
- Amazon announced that video streams on Prime Instant Video nearly tripled year over yearAmazon announced a content licensing agreement with HBO, making Prime Instant Video the exclusive online-only subscription home for select HBO programming, including The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Big Love,Deadwood, Eastbound and Down, Family Tree, Enlightened, Treme, early seasons of Boardwalk Empire and True Blood, as well as mini-series like Band of Brothers, John Adams, and more. The first wave of content will arrive on Prime Instant Video May 21.In addition, Prime Instant Video is now the exclusive online-only subscription home for FOX’s 24, BBC America’sOrphan Black, FX’s The Americans, and MTV’s Teen Wolf.
- Amazon introduced Prime Instant Video for the U.K. and Germany, offering thousands of popular movies and TV episodes available for unlimited streaming to Prime members. Prime members also continue to receive unlimited One-Day Delivery on millions of items and access to 500,000 Kindle books to borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
- Amazon Studios greenlit six original pilots for full seasons available exclusively to Prime members — The After, Bosch, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, Mozart in the Jungle, Transparent and Wishenpoof! will become the next Amazon Original Series following rave customer reviews of the pilot episodes. In addition, Garry Trudeau’s political series Alpha House will return for a second season.
- Amazon Studios announced it has greenlit two new pilots — the half hour dramatic comedy The Cosmopolitans, fromWhit Stillman, and the one hour drama Hand of God from Executive Producers Marc Forster, Ben Watkins, Ron Perlman, Brian Wilkins and Jeff King — for its third pilot season debuting later this year on Amazon Instant Video.
“We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Our device team launched Fire TV, offering great content, including our recently announced exclusive deal withHBO, and innovative features like unified voice search, which we’re delighted is being adopted by so many new partners, including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, Crackle and Showtime Anytime. The team is working hard to keep Fire TV in stock. Our retail team launched Prime Pantry, a new option available only to Prime members offering exclusive access to everyday essentials in non-bulk sizes — ranging from breakfast foods and popular soft drinks, to cleaning and personal care items. And, our AWS team significantly lowered prices on EC2, S3 and RDS, saving AWS customers hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several months alone.”
Amazon expect their second quarter sales to net between $18.1 billion and $19.9 billion or to grow between 15% and 26% compared with second quarter 2013.
See the full press release here.