Amazon will probably soon launch their video streaming service in the Netherlands. Thanks to this current television channels in the Netherlands have difficulties with acquiring and broadcasting good films and series, because Amazon is buying the licenses for these films and series. Other video streaming services in the Netherlands like Netflix thinks that the upcoming competition of Amazon is a good thing. The CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings says: ‘’When the competition is good the whole market will grow, also thanks to this we will have a lot of media attention and people will go from traditional television stations to streaming services’’.

The video streaming service will be called Prime Video. When you buy a subscription for Prime Video you also get free e-books, music and free shipment of physical goods bought at Amazon. So Amazon will also use Prime Video to become more popular in the Netherlands for buying goods on the internet. They add this streaming service in Netherlands to their value proposition. So they use an online technology to become more valuable for customers and try to be more attractive for  customers than Bol.com, Ebay or Coolblue for example.

Off course the question is if Prime Video will be a success in the Netherlands. If people will not take a subscription on Prime Video, they will for sure also not buy more at the Amazon store. And with the competition of Netflix in the video streaming industry and Spotify in the music streaming industry is will be hard for Amazon to become an important player in these industries in the Netherlands. They do not have the first mover advantage and they maybe will be too late to play an important role.

We will see how the story in the Netherlands continues!

Last week I heard the news that Blackberry stopped producing their own smartphones. Back in the days everyone wanted a blackberry, most likely thanks to the ping application. I really thought: How is it possible that they have to stop producing their phones? Off course now everywhere you look you almost only see Samsung phones or iPhones. But how is it possible that Blackberry, the company had a market share of nearly 50% in the U.S. in 2009, has to stop producing their own smartphones because it is losing money for the company?

The market share of Blackberry is at the moment less than 1%. The competition keeps introducing and implementing new technologies and customers now a days want the best of the best and the newest of the newest. So if you cannot provide that to your potential customers you will definitely lose the battle. And then you are going to lose money on your own smartphones and you have to stop producing your own hardware component. It almost look the same as the Nokia case. They were also market leader, but when they did not introduce and/or implement new technologies, their market share also decreased dramatically. Blackberry will still give licenses to other hardware production companies if they want to produce Blackberry smartphones based on the latest operating system that is now implemented in the latest versions of Blackberry smartphones. Blackberry will now focus on improving their operating system and/or develop new operating systems.

The downfall of Blackberry is due most through not or to late developing and improving their operating system and it will be a question if they ever will be back on top.