At a congressional oversight hearing last month, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler indicated that his earlier proposal to classify certain over-the-top video services as “multichannel video programming distributors” (MVPDs), a regulatory term of art that applies to cable and satellite providers, was on more or less indefinite hold.
“The purpose of rulemaking is to learn,” Wheeler told the committee. “We learned that [a] vast number of things are developing very rapidly, and we have not moved forward on that notice of proposed rulemaking and don’t see, until situations change, we would.”
Among those “vast number of things,” no doubt, were Amazon’s confidential plans to bundle third-party OTT services in with Amazon Prime, allowing Prime Instant Video users to put together a package of OTT channels through a single subscription. As first reported by BloombergBusiness, Amazon Prime customers “will have the option of adding other online subscriptions to their accounts, including major, well-known movie and TV channels, and Amazon will also sell prepackaged bundles of its own creation…[T]he new feature may go live as soon as next month.”
The offering would “resemble something between a cable-TV subscription, though without live programming, and the online array of video offered through devices from Roku Inc., Apple TV or Amazon’s own Fire TV,” according to Bloomberg. Read More »