The thing is that I ordered so much shipping, I decided to sign up for Amazon Prime, a "premium" service that for 10€ a year (20€ a year from next year), allows you to receive the items in super-short terms and without paying shipping costs. If you order more than five or six packages a year it's worth it just because of the savings in shipping costs.
But in the United States and some other markets, Amazon Prime is much more. For starters, it's a lot more expensive: $99 a year. But the trade-off is huge. For that price ($8.25 a month) you get free shipping, an unlimited storage server for your photos (Dropbox-like), a free radio service (Spotify-style), access to the entire collection of digitized Kindle books (of which there are thousands), and most importantly, Instant Video.
Instant Video is the Netflix-style "video on demand" system under which the new show from Andy Williams and the Skull Trio (Clarkson, May and Hammond) will be released.
Right now Instant Video is not available in Spain, but the country's economic recovery (Amazon's words, not mine) will allow it to arrive "soon". How soon? Well, we're not sure. Asking experts on the subject (after Amazon's refusal to give us a specific date) put Instant Video in 2016 in Spain.
So yes, it could be the case that we could have Top Gear through Instant Video in Spain, without major problem, next year, almost coinciding with the premiere, and using it as a vector for growth.
On the other hand, Amazon has reserved the right to re-sell the product to conventional television channels, so we would expect to see Discovery bidding for the television rights for Spain of this product, but we doubt that Amazon will cede it if it can offer it directly to end users in our country.
Whether people will be willing to pay for it is another matter entirely. The pay-per-view culture in our country is still very weak. People are reluctant to pay to watch content on the Internet, despite the fact that the offer is already huge and the prices, in many cases, ridiculous (there are movie rentals for two euros on the Internet, and people prefer to spend hours of their lives tinkering with the computer to download them for free from portals of dubious origin, with bad results in many cases).
My personal opinion agrees with that of the head of Amazon when he talked about this issue: As soon as the service offered has sufficiently low prices, people will stop racking their brains to try to download content for free. If watching the latest one-hour programme from the exes of Top Gear ends up costing one or two euros (the price of a coffee, yes), would people really prefer to spend their time searching the web for a site to download the programme from, and then transfer it to the TV, or would they prefer to use the app integrated in their smart TV directly?
The problem I do see is that Instant Video is offered in an indissoluble way within that package of $ 99 per year, which could well be 90 € per year in our market. Yes, it's €7.5 a month, no big deal (you'll easily spend more than that on car magazines, right?), but paying for non-physical digital stuff is still not considered in a positive way in this country.
Your turn to have your say: How much would you pay to see the skull trio on Amazon?
