Amazon.com (AMZN) unit Amazon Studios said Monday that it’s approved six more of its original pilots to be produced as full-season TV series, following what it called rave customer reviews. The original content will be aired exclusively for members on Prime Instant Video. The move further boosts its competition with Netflix (NFLX) and others in providing original content for video-streaming services. The Amazon shows are: “The After,” a sci-fi
Where there are clouds, there’s going to be thunder. And that certainly holds true for cloud computing. Google and Amazon.com this week created a lot of noise in the information technology industry when they slashed prices on their Internet-based services for businesses. On Tuesday, Google cut prices dramatically for its cloud-computing services, which allow companies to rent computing resources accessed via the Internet cloud. On Wednesday, Amazon responded with price reductions for its Amazon Web Services. Those actions are the latest in an ongoing price war where the major IT companies are battling to dominate the next-generation computing platform. Other players, including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Microsoft (MSFT) and Rackspace (RAX), have been cutting prices as well. RBC Capital Markets estimates that Amazon (AMZN) Web Services has lowered prices by 36% vs. early Q4 2013 levels, to an effective rate of $27 per gigabyte of RAM per month. Google (GOOG) has lowered pricing by 35% to $34 per GB of RAM per month over the same period, RBC said in a research note late Wednesday.
Amazon.com (AMZN)’s Amazon Web Services said Wednesday that all four of its cloud computing infrastructure regions in the U.S. have met Department of Defense security standards. The company says this will allow more U.S. military agencies to use AWS’ services. The four regions, including AWS GovCloud (U.S.), have received so-called DoD Provisional Authorization under the DoD Cloud Security Model for Impact Levels 1-2. Amazon says the technical