Amazon Studios has been out for at least 4 months previous to the writing.

Thanks for the info, I hadn't heard about it. Apparently a lot of other people didn't either if it's on the front page right now.

Still, I can see them needing more time to ramp up before making any strategic changes angled at displacing the studios.

Thanks for clearing that up, just before I read your comment I was thinkg "Wow, that was fast."

It was launched in the fall of 2010.

Thanks for correcting me. Also, we have similar usernames. ;)

I haven't heard about it before either. I thought the same thing when I saw this.

There was a small mention of it by Bezos in the December Wired http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_bezos/all/1

I stumbled on it last month and was surprised that I'd never heard of it before.

Could be, but for now their official stand is:

  The goal of Amazon Studios is to work with Hollywood
  to turn the best projects into major feature films.

But "Hollywood" is such a broad term. Perhaps their intentions are to work with the "good" or necessary parts of Hollywood like actors, directors, writers, CGI teams, camera crews, sound experts, etc. without the large media companies themselves.

It's really been Amazon's core strategy all along: the classic "cut out the middle man."

This needs more upvotes. Let's stop painting "Hollywood" with a broad brush. What we really mean, when we direct our wrath at "Hollywood," is the studio system. The conglomerates. Etc.

Caught up in that system are some truly creative, kind, brilliant, hard-working people. Take writers, for example. I've spent a good portion of my career working with writers. Screenwriters are some of the coolest, geekiest, smartest, craziest, most endearingly awkward people I've ever known. They're not unlike the engineers I've worked with in other capacities, actually. Writing code and writing fiction are obviously very different trades, but the souls of the crafts are very similar.

"Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo."

I agree, and this would be a very typical long-term move by Amazon: they systematically partner with existing incumbents, and then develop a business model that renders them redundant. Book publishing was the first example.

I agree that just because they work with the studios doesn't mean they don't fit the bill.

I think they don't fit because it's boring. It's scaling up and updating of "I'll help you sell your screenplay" newspaper ads. Open to everyone but with predatory terms.

Another middleman to the studios.

It's not innovative and it's not killing anything.

I would say also, with the YC rfs, I think any startup going down that path would be better of not being anti-hollywood as an official line.

The goal of Amazon is to work with publishers to turn the best books into bestsellers.

They got to learn the business from the inside first... ;)

I thought the same thing until I read "The goal of Amazon Studios is to work with Hollywood to turn the best projects into major feature films"