Netflix Mocks Amazon With Video for DVD Delivery Drone
Netflix is on the attack. Just weeks after CEO Reed Hastings trashed rival HBO during a quarterly earnings call, the online TV and movie outfit is now taking a potshot at Amazon, releasing a fake advertisement for DVD drone delivery.
The satirical video mocks Amazon's claim that it will one day deliver retail goods via unmanned aerial vehicle. It also shows that, as streaming video becomes its central business, Netflix has decided to go on offense. That means taking on not only old school media companies like HBO, but web giants like Amazon, which is also moving into the business of streaming TV shows and movies online.
Late last year, during a fawning 60 Minutes profile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos showed Charlie Rose a prototype of an Amazon delivery drone. The stunt was accompanied by its own marketing video that promised a future in which autonomous octocopters would carry orders from Amazon warehouses straight to customers' doorsteps. The video made no mention of federal laws that would make such deliveries impossible. It also failed to notw that such an approach to delivery for Amazon made no sense.
In the minute-long, pitch-perfect satire of Amazon's drone ad, Netflix DVD division manager Hank Breeggemann announces 'Drone 2 Home,' a service to deliver DVDs 'seconds' after adding them to your queue. 'We have literally spent days working out most of the bugs,' Breeggemann promises as footage shows one of the copters chasing a woman through a warehouse parking lot.
One of the perhaps inadvertently funny parts of the Netflix video is the reminder that, yes, Netflix still does deliver DVDs. Once its only business, DVD delivery has taken a back seat at Netflix to streaming video. And it's in streaming, not DVDs, that Netflix faces a formidable rival in Amazon, which offers a very similar service as part of Amazon Prime. For just $79 a year - less than the annual cost of Netflix - Amazon customers get a comparable video service plus unlimited two-day shipping.
However silly its drone ploy, Amazon is a company Netflix has to take very seriously. As the many brick-and-mortar store chains Amazon has either put out of business or at least on the ropes over the past two decades can testify, it's Bezos who often has the last laugh.
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