Fortune

Q&A with Amazon Studios director Roy Price about how to make good TV and why it makes sense for Amazon.

The COO spoke about Amazon’s business model for original programming.

“Our business model is fairly straightforward because we have a subscription service so the goal of our program is simply to attract people to Amazon Prime,” he said. He said Amazon has put out 24 pilots so far, which is more than a typical broadcast network will do per year for prime time. “We're busy because we don't have a slate, a lineup. Maybe in a few years we can pull it back a little bit,” he said.

Price said this makes sense for Amazon. “What you really want in the on-demand environment, which is different than the broadcast environment, is that you need to find people who really like the show enough to seek it out. You need to really want to watch the show in modern TV, Price explained. "It's not about changing the channel anywhere, or just seeing what's on. It's not good enough to be good-ish,” he said.

[Commentary] Some will rely on comparative valuation analysis to argue that private and public prices for companies are overvalued. That's fine though imprecise, and almost no help in terms of timing. Others will point to scarcity of real estate, salaries paid for engineers, or the inability to nail down a reservation at a hot San Francisco restaurant. All are good tells of a tech bubble.

Mine, however, revolve around my personal experiences of having lived through the last one. The oversupply of journalism jobs covering the technology industry, for example, is a good indicator.

Silicon Valley is the hottest story going these days, and not just because The New Yorker, New York magazine, and the New York Times Magazine have discovered it. New digital publications devoted exclusively to covering technology have sprung up, including PandoDaily, The Information, Re/code, and (in its early years) Mashable. That, in turn, has provoked a frenzy of tech-coverage hiring at the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

All of these reporters are now competing for what a wise editor at one of these publications calls "micro scoops," stories that are fresh, exclusive, newsy -- and most likely irrelevant to all but a group of people you could count on your hands and feet.

The caveat is that I have no idea when this game of musical chairs will end and who will be left standing. I just know that it will end. This time around, I plan to keep my eyes open for the interesting companies and entrepreneurs that are sure to survive this strange period. Because the tech bubble is upon us -- and I fully expect it to burst.

While synonymous with the search business, perhaps Google's most significant legacy will be its organizational obsession with data-driven decision making. Google's intellectual and strategic impact has encouraged the measurement of -- well -- everything.

Consider how Nielsen, among the world's oldest media companies, has changed. Long known as the official ratings firm, companies and careers have lived or died based on Nielsen's ratings.

First, Nielsen created deep data partnerships with Facebook, Twitter and Experian to make their panel reporting considerably more accurate. Second, Nielsen is nearing the conclusion of a 4-year odyssey to set measurement standards for video -- a kind of Gross Rating Point (GRP) across all media and devices that measures the size and engagement of the viewing audience. Now Google, Netflix, Apple and others have a stake in how video GRP will be calculated. Nielsen has reinvented the GRP, a standard that has been the source of much of the television market's hegemony in media.

In partnering with an array of digital data providers, Nielsen looks, feels, and acts more and more like an Internet company that measures with substantially increased precision.

In this exponentially fractured media landscape, television audiences will likely get smaller (they have been for decades). Marketers will struggle to justify their upfront advertising purchases because content will be consumed at time-shifted moments using panoply of devices and distribution services.

Streaming television services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have long held appeal to so-called cord-cutters who seek to enjoy TV content without having to subscribe to conventional cable TV.

Who needs 1,000 channels, they ask, with a monthly bill to match?

The challenge: Many cable companies also serve as Internet service providers, making it difficult to truly cut the cord. Netflix announced that it had struck a deal with the seventh-largest cable operator in the US, Suddenlink, to put its streaming service on cable boxes for the cable operator's 1.2 million customers.

In late April, three smaller cable companies -- RCN, Grande Communications, and Atlantic Broadband -- announced that they too would carry Netflix on cable boxes provided to some 500,000 customers through an agreement with TiVo. Netflix and its peers, commonly referred to as over-the-top (OTT) content, were supposed to disrupt the traditional cable business. Have they become part of the problem?

"Netflix has been commonly positioned as competitive to cable TV," said David Isenberg, chief marketing and strategy officer for Atlantic Broadband. "But the two services are really very complementary."

Amazons want to be an entertainment giant.

During Amazon's first quarter alone, the company released its long-rumored Fire TV, a $99 TV streaming and casual gaming device, unveiled its first video game courtesy of Amazon Game Studios, and inked a major deal with HBO that gives its Prime Instant Video service rights to older HBO shows such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire.

"We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start," CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

A portion of the new catalog likely stems from the recent HBO deal. Amazon has also invested heavily in original content creation via its Hollywood arm. In the short-term, it's easy to think of Prime Video as a Netflix competitor, the former gaining ground on the latter company with new distribution deals and original content.

But Prime Video is just one piece in a bigger plan. Amazon wants to create an entertainment experience that's so compelling it can't be ignored. It wants to offer original and exclusive content streamed via Amazon services and served up on slickly-designed Amazon hardware, so competitively priced that few competitors can keep up.

[Commentary] It's a good time to delve into a development that could forever reshape the future of television: the possible merger between two of the nation's biggest cable companies, Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

A merger between these giants would threaten an open and fair market for cable television as well as Internet access.

To understand this, consider that Comcast could gain 11 million subscribers if it buys Time Warner Cable. Even if it winds up divesting 3 million subscribers to Charter Communications to gain approval from the Federal Communications Commission, the combined company will still have 30 million subscribers nationwide.

Some would say the companies don't directly compete -- Comcast has its own markets, such as in Philadelphia and Washington (DC), and Time Warner Cable has its own, such as in New York and North Carolina. The lack of overlap may temper antitrust concerns, but even geographically divergent markets can create an anticompetitive environment.

Another factor to consider is how the scarcity of a necessary resource like broadband will inevitably increase the power of monopolistic distributors while hurting content providers and consumers.

So while the merger may not be anti-competitive in terms of eliminating existing competition, it does obviate the need for both Comcast and Time Warner Cable to expand their services and aggressively compete with each other on price, quality of service, and capacity, which amounts to the same thing. The Federal Communications Commission should consider all this before approving a deal and recognize the long-term ramifications of allowing cable juggernauts to expand their footprint artificially instead of through investment and competition.

[Sanghoee is a political and business commentator]

[Commentary] Should Aereo win the right to retransmit the over-the-air signals of television broadcasters, other operators could use similar technologies to also avoid paying the retransmission fees, and that, say some legal experts, could undermine the entire broadcast business model.

The rumors of the death of broadcast TV could be greatly exaggerated however. Pamela Samuelson, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law said: "My prediction is that the court will split on the case, but Aereo will win on statutory interpretation and the court will say if you don't like this result, tell it to Congress.

Aereo has on its side that Microsoft and other tech companies think that many cloud services companies would be at risk if ABC's interpretation of the statute prevails." However, the broadcasters may instead opt for what some have called the "nuclear option."

In the summer of 2013, executives at Fox threatened to pull its prime time content and move it to a cable offering, while more recently CBS hinted it might also consider such a strategy. The question becomes whether broadcasters could really make the jump to cable.

[Commentary] Aereo will finally plead its case to the nine US Supreme Court justices who will determine its fate. Since the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, retransmitters of broadcast signals have been required to first obtain permission from the broadcasters -- who own copyrights to much of the programming encoded therein.

Congress has enacted elaborate rules dictating how cable and satellite providers can obtain such permission -- sometimes through statutory licenses and sometimes through negotiation. As a result, retransmitters generally end up paying fees for the privilege, and retransmission fees have become a crucial portion of broadcasters' revenue, especially as advertising revenues wane in an Internet-dominated world.

Yet because of Aereo's quirky technology -- which is in many respects less efficient than existing, alternative methodologies -- Aereo claims it can do an end-run around the need to ask such permission. As the broadcasters look at things, then, Aereo "simply captures over-the-air broadcasts and then, without authorization, profits from retransmitting those broadcasts to its subscribers," the broadcasters write in the joint brief, which was authored by a team headed by Paul Clement of the Bancroft law firm and Paul Smith of Jenner & Block.

"This would seem to be obvious copyright infringement -- an entire business model premised on massive and unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works, where the prices of competitors are undercut because they are licensed and pay fees." The government rejects Aereo's attempt to portray itself as a simple provider of individual antennae and DVRs, stressing its status as "an integrated system."

[Commentary] Google opens up its Explorer Program, offering the general public an opportunity to purchase Glass for $1,500. Although spots are limited, the expansion of the Glass club has created tremendous excitement across tech blogs and Silicon Valley -- finally, the tools are readily available to record our complete existence, every moment of our lives on Earth, every face we encounter.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, we need not be concerned if our entire lives are recorded and made visible to others, because: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Reality, of course, is far more complex than Schmidt's vision of a flat monoculture of morals. We all do things that we don't want our grandmothers, significant others, friends, or bosses to see. But Glass changes all that because we no longer have control over how our lives are recorded and shared online.

A key driver of our cultural output is our robust civil society -- the private sphere of human interactions outside of business or government that creates and nurtures new ideas. We don't need to go back far in history -- the Stasi, McCarthyism, the Salem witch trials, etc. -- to observe the disastrous cultural effects wrought by the breakdown of civil society. In all of these cases, the usurping of privacy was a key tool of the regime in control; the perception of being constantly watched created a normalizing effect, where citizens slowly internalized the surveillance and modified their behaviors to be less and less idiosyncratic.

[Madsbjerg is a senior partner at ReD Associates]

[Commentary] Chris Dixon, one of my favorite writers and investors, wrote a piece on what he sees as the inevitable decline of the web as the world transitions to mobile computing.

The thesis is simple -- mobile is dominating, and apps dominate mobile. Ergo, the web is dead. However, Chris misses a critical distinction that must be made to understand the future (or possible non-future) of the web. 'the web' heretofore has meant two things:

1. A distributed platform for publishing content globally
2. A frictionless delivery system for Internet-enabled software

Unfortunately, these two things are often conflated, which has led to countless confused conversations. Clearly, mobile will be the dominant medium for computing. Rich native mobile apps provide a significantly better customer experience over web apps loaded via a mobile browser. For this reason, Internet- enabled software will transition primarily to mobile apps.

However, that doesn't mean mobile apps will displace the web as the world's primary publishing platform. More devices and more users will only drive demand for more and better content. Content will continue to be primarily published via the web.

[Rosen is co-founder and CEO of Pantheon, a San Francisco-based professional website platform for developers, marketers, and IT users]