Amazon's Cloud player. Competition at last?

Amazon's announcement yesterday of its 'cloud player' service caught the tech world by surprise. When it comes to battles in the area of mobile world the traditional script presents the protagonists  as Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft, with perhaps a few hardware manufactures thrown in for good measure (you could include, HTC, HP, Motorola and maybe even Nokia). But Amazon's launch of a cloud storage product that has the potential to stream all of your media to any device you have is very much about the mobile market.

It is perhaps hard to think of a company that got it's start in the mail order business as being a key player in the mobile arena, but the infrastructure Amazon built for selling books over the internet has been developed to offer the abilities to store and deliver digital content and provide a platform for anyone to deliver web services.

But more importantly, Amazon are a customer focused company. The reaction of the record companies sums up the difference between their revenue focused model and Amazon's customer focuses view, describing the cloud player service  as; 

"it's very uncompelling from a consumer standpoint"

"Google and Apple are probably laughing at Amazon for launching with something so basic"

"If they wanted to offer a third-rate service, [Apple and Google] would have done so already,"

This ignores that facts that the cloud player is in fact a very compelling service from a consumer standpoint, and that there is no other service of this type being provided by a 'first-rate' supplier. But for me, the key quote came from a representative of one of the major labels;

"If you want to do anything feature-rich, you have to have licenses."

This is as close as you will get to the media companies admitting that if you want to do anything new and interesting with the media you have paid for, they will want to be paid again. But the idea that consumers and media companies have different views when it comes to ownership of media is hardly new. Record companies have spent decades trying to bend new technology to fit old revenue models. But Sony's complaint that;

"We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music"

...rings somewhat hollow when you remember that Amazon is one of the few companies that offers any competition to Apple's iTunes store. Sony, and other media companies, could well prevent Amazon's move by removing the right to sell their music, but by doing so they could easily hand the market for digital music straight to Apple. Sony and others may have have to chose the lesser of two evils, do they want additional license fees for streaming music or do they want a real competitor to iTunes?

But what makes Amazon's cloud player really interesting is what it means for mobile competition. While many had focused on the idea of Apple versus Google as the key battle for mobile devices, this view limits the conversation to hardware competition. Amazon are coming to this from an entirely content based perspective. Yes, Amazon do sell hardware in the form of the Kindle (and the Kindle is a class leading piece of hardware) but Amazon are platform agnostic, you can read Kindle books on your Kindle, or your iOS device, or your Android device or even on your PC. The iTunes music/video/app model offers a compelling reason to remain within the Apple ecosystem, but with the prospect of Amazon offering all your media across all common mobile and non-mobile platforms you suddenly have a content ecosystem that supports any device you choose. When you consider the recent release of the Amazon appstore for Android it becomes very easy to see a future where Apple's most capable competitor is not Google, or Microsoft, or any number of hardware manufactures who hitched their waggon to Android, but Amazon's platform agnostic content cloud.

That is assuming the record companies' lawyers don't spoil it first.