In hopes of building on the success of its Kindle e-books business, Internet retailer Amazon will now make its digital music and video available on as many gadgets as possible.
The reasoning is if customers prefer to use Amazon music and video on Kindle, they're likely to purchase the content from Amazon than from its competitors. The idea came into focus on Wednesday when the company released an iPad app, which lets customers stream and download videos of Amazon on an Apple device.
Amazon quickly responded and last week, the company updated its Cloud Player digital music app, which is already available on Apple devices, Windows based and Android based devices.
There have even been a few rumours swirling that Amazon might roll its own smartphone.
"A key objective is to sell more stuff, whether physical or digital," said Bill Carr, vice president of digital music and video, Amazon. "The way we do that is by looking at what problems customers have that we can solve. They want to read books, listen to music and watch TV shows and movies wherever they are and they don't want that to be hard work. If the customer experience is better, they want to do it more often. The availability of our apps on multiple devices is a big part of that."
Amazon is the market leader on the e-book market since users who buy a Kindle can read the content using various devices with the Kindle app. But their digital music and video businesses are not on par with their e-book business. The leader in digital music is Apple's iTunes store covering 50 percent of the market, and when it comes to video it is Netflix with 55 percent of market.
Amazon will also be making an entry into mobile games market. Amazon's digital sales have been rising fast. Amazon might be at risk if the other companies start capping the number of apps in their devices.