Let’s face it. Most of us can no longer live our lives without the help of our favorite retail giant: Amazon. Procrastinators can’t remember how they ever got through the Christmas season without Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping. Echo and Alexa are common household names. AmazonFresh and now Amazon Restaurants mean that you will never need to leave the house again. What more could we possibly want?
Amazon is never finished rolling out services and products. Now that Amazon Music and Amazon Video have us hooked, why not… AmazonTube? Amazon filed trademark requests in December for “AmazonTube” and “OpenTube.” While this doesn’t mean that they’re on the brink of launching a YouTube competitor, we’re taking note. Google versus Amazon may not be a bad thing. Apparently, there’s already precedent.
For the past two years, Amazon has refused to sell Google Chromecast devices on its website. Amazon appeared to offer an olive branch last Friday, when the retailer announced that it would begin selling Chromecasts, in addition to the Apple TV, but the devices are still not listed on the site. And today, Amazon Fire TVs began supporting Mozilla’s Firefox browser, in a hilariously passive-aggressive slight to Google Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser by a mile.
This streaming service would essentially be Amazon’s latest weapon. These trademarks were filed on the exact same day Google announced that it would remove its YouTube app from Amazon’s Fire TV devices Jan. 1. This, in turn, comes in response to Amazon withholding its Amazon Prime Video services from Google’s Chromecast devices (Youtube is also not available on Amazon’s Echo Show devices).
The filings outline an app for “transmitting, accessing, receiving, uploading, downloading, encoding, decoding, streaming, broadcasting, sharing, displaying, formatting, manipulating, organizing, book marking, tagging, storing, caching, and transferring electronic works.” Such works could include, according to the filings, photos, videos, text, images, documents, or books.
Amazon also claims its new product will be a social networking site, incorporating “wireless telecommunications networks in the field of online social networking.”
Amazon may be one of the only companies in the world who could attempt such a task. Should they try it?