Lot 49: Amazon <strike>Shills For</strike> Tracks New Disc Formats Archives

05/18/06

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Amazon Shills For Tracks New Disc Formats

Jeff Barr, over at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog, notes an interesting use of AWS: The DVD Wars. It's a site set up to track the sales of HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, ostensibly to help consumers make an informed choice about which format to support.

I say "ostensibly" because the registered site administrator has an Amazon.com email address. Now it could be that AWS developers can get Amazon.com email addresses and the company has nothing to do with this site. ~~But given that Amazon's PR agency alerted me to the site, it certainly looks like The DVD Wars was set up as a PR scheme to showcase the utility of AWS and to drive sales of the two new disc formats.~~ Correction: Based on the comment left by Jeff Barr, my initial assessment seems overly critical. Though it turns out the developer behind The DVD Wars works at Amazon (and the disclosure of this fact would've been helpful), "shills" incorrectly characterizes Jeff's intent.

I have to say I'm with David Pogue when it comes to HD DVD and Blu-ray. The world doesn't need either format.

Posted by Thomas Claburn on May 18, 2006 | Permalink

1 Comments

Jeff Barr said:

Hi Thomas, the site developer happens to work for Amazon but in a role that is unrelated to DVDs or to AWS. The company encourages employees to learn about our own technologies (including and especially AWS) and this site is the result of one such endeavor.

As far as my being a shill, the developer sent me a "hey Jeff, look what I built" email. I checked it out, thought that it was worth blogging about, and then did so. Same thing happens for the many sites that I blog about each month. In most cases I really don't care if the site was built by a current or former Amazon employee.

Given that the site is powered by AWS and as far as I know exhibits no favoritism toward either format, its hard to see how I have been shilled.

My view was that this site makes very clever use of Amazon's data, and my only regret was that I hadn't thought of doing it myself. Given that my 16 year old son asks me about Amazon's position on the two formats almost every week, that's especially painful.

If it looks different to you, drop me a note (you now have my email address) and I'll be more than happy to discuss it.

May 18, 2006 3:07 PM

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