Amazon Tracker: Is This The Year Prime Takes Over America?

By the end of the year, Amazon Prime will be in more than 50 percent of American homes, predicts Cowen and Co. The most recent Prime Day brought more new Prime subscribers into the eFamily than any other 24-hour period, and analysts believe that will give the eCommerce giant the nudge it needs to pass this milestone. Another key attractor was the constant growth of new Prime services: Prime Now, Prime Pantry, Prime Video and Prime Music, just to name a few.

Amazon Pay Balance is now in beta for users in India to leverage mobile recharges. The Amazon Pay feature is a mobile wallet that lets users load up with money from their bank account and then make payments directly from their Amazon Pay balance, rather than using cash on delivery or entering card information every time they transact. It competes with other mobile wallets in the Indian market, such as Paytm and MobiKwik.

Hulu chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the cloud provider for its new over-the-top (OTT) live TV service, “Hulu with Live TV,” which launched in May. The service includes 50 live channels. Hulu said it selected AWS because of its “elasticity, agility and security,” which saved Hulu from having to build its own data centers and accelerated the product’s time to market.

Robert Kirkman, one of the co-creators of The Walking Dead comic book series that sparked the popular TV show, has signed a deal with Amazon to produce exclusive Amazon Prime Video content via his own Skybound Entertainment company to air on the streaming service. Skybound also recently entered into an arrangement with Universal, and Kirkman’s comics Outcast, Invincible and Thief of Thieves have garnered strong followings, with Outcast turned into a Cinemax horror series.

AWS rolled out its new security service Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify and protect any sensitive data entered into AWS. Macie recognizes identifying information as well as intellectual property and offers visibility into how that data is being accessed or moved via a dashboard and alerts. So far, Macie can protect data in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, with plans to expand her capabilities to cover further AWS data stores later in the year.

Ticketmaster may have met its match, as Amazon eyes event ticket sales as its next potential conquest. Amazon already has relationships with key music industry players, and many Ticketmaster customers have been eager for a change, due to the company’s disproportionate fees and other practices. Venues and teams could also benefit from diversification in distribution avenues. However, Amazon’s tight hold on certain customer data that venues want could become a deal breaker.

Amazon Web Services unlocked AWS Glue for all customers on Aug. 14. The service simplifies customers’ preparation and loading processes as they input data into various AWS destinations. Running an extract, transform and load job can be done with just a few clicks using the new tool, which not only pulls the selected data but any and all associated metadata. According to Amazon’s press release on Glue, the service saves customers the time investment normally required for an analytics project, which can take months and grow unwieldy as more data is added.