The moguls at Amazon buy out "the Netflix of Europe"

AMAZON ACQUIRES REMAINING SHARES IN LOVEFILM

Wall Street Journal's Ben Rooney writes, for TechEurope, that LoveFilm is Europe’s leading DVD-by-post rental service.

'Amazon already had a significant shareholding in LoveFilm, reported to be around 42%.  Unofficial reports put the cost of the deal at £200 million ($320 million).

The deal makes perfect sense for Amazon.  The company has all the bases covered now: books with Kindle, retailing mp3s and now video-on-demand with LoveFilm. '

  Actually, Amazon already has video-on-demand for U.S. customers.  I've found that many aren't aware of that.  This would allow Amazon to include much of Europe.

  With the U.S. video-on-demand program -- if you don't rent a video but buy it, Amazon stores a copy in "Your Video Library" on its servers so that you can watch it online if you want, from wherever you are, or you can also download it for off-line viewing on Windows PCs using the Unbox Video Player.  "Downloaded videos can be transferred to compatible portable video players so that you can watch your videos on the go."  Something I didn't know.  I also don't know the quality level of it vs getting a DVD or Blu-Ray disc.   A bit more:

' In just over seven years, LoveFilm has become one of Europe’s largest entertainment subscription businesses with over 1.5 million subscribers across the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
. . .
  Investors in LoveFilm are a pretty good 'who’s who' of top European venture firms [and] include Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit and Index Ventures. '

Read more at the WSJ article

This is not about a Kindle-feature, but many of us who read on Kindles (UK: K3)'s probably tend to be interested in Amazon's expansion into the product areas of films and streaming video as well, whether in the U.S. or Europe etc.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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