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Saturday morning, an odd thing happened for some Amazon users.  Some Prime members had access to a new part of Amazon’s website for a few hours.   That section detailed how their Prime membership includes access to streaming movies and TV shows.  Specifically:

“Your Amazon Prime membership now includes unlimited, commercial-free instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows at no additional cost”

Sounds a lot like Netflix.  Doesn’t it?

Someone had the wherewithal to capture screenshots, which Endgaget published Saturday afternoon.  These show some of the selections available, how the “watch, rent, buy” options would work, and some details on how the video streaming works.

The “Watch” option is available only to Amazon Prime members, who can stream these movies free of charge and at will.  The “Rent” option allows for a 3-day rental window for non-Prime members to rent and stream the movie as often as they’d like for three days – most for around $4.  The buy option buys the DVD.

Amazon has been rumored to be working on this for some time now and with the apparently accidental rollout of their video streaming site, it’s now an obvious reality about to happen.  Several domains such as “primeinstantvideos.com” and similar variations have been purchased by DPReview, a business entity of Amazon’s.

So Netflix could have some competition coming soon.  Prime memberships are currently $79/year while the cheapest Netflix membership works out to $95.88/year, so this could trigger something of a price and content war.  Which would also be refreshing.

The Internet giant Google has continued its relentless march by acquiring two more start-ups and has begun incorporating them into the Mountain View fold. The fflick service has been added to the YouTube unit thanks to the twitter mining movie recommendation site, presumably to bolster Google’s recent foray into IPTV and YouTube’s expansion into films and TV.

There are many conversations about YouTube content happening all the time, and Google plans to use fflick to analyse these and serve up more relevant and interesting content. Google has reportedly paid around $10 million for the company started by ex-Digg employees although nothing official has been released about the numbers.

In another media related buy, SayNow was also acquired by Google. SayNow aims to try and connect celebrities and their devoted fans with voice based communication. It allows users to broadcast and receive voice messages and even participate in conversations (one-to-one or in groups). There’s tight integration with social networking as well as mobile platforms including iPhone and Android. This should ease the integration with Google Voice, and provide an interesting direction for Google to go down. The SayNow site brings some 15 million users, celebrities and brands to the Google fold – and both acquisitions will add over 6000 staff to Google. Small fry for the world’s most profitable Internet company

Storenvy has been described as the Tumblr of e-commerce. The site allows anyone to set up an online presence that can sell almost anything to anyone – and for the moment it’s totally free. By giving away the tools to create an online marketplace, small independent stores can sell online as well as use the usual social outlets to promote their wares – think Twitter and Facebook.

Currently, the stores which are mainly based in San Francisco have attracted over 60,000 shoppers who have visited some 2,800 stores, big numbers for a small start-up. The site resembles a more social version of Etsy with lots of cool and unique products for sale but there’s an important difference. There are no fees! That’s right, the site takes no fees from its customers (buyers or sellers) so they’ve had to go looking for serious investment to build momentum.

In this climate, Storenvy has almost performed the impossible and found $1.5 million dollars which should see the site ticking over for quite a while. In the distant future, there will be a switch to a freemium model but nothing has been confirmed regarding this. This is not an uncommon move for current start-ups but really does require a significant user-base to make this viable. The investment money is going to be used to recruit and form a team – mainly Ruby and UI/UX developers but this should fuel the immense growth envisaged by its founders and presumably the investors.

Internet research firm EMarketer Inc. says that Twitter will be tripling its advertising revenue this year to $150 million, according to Business Week.  That will be pretty impressive, if it happens.

The prediction comes as part of a larger prediction for Twitter’s next few years, with $150M being the 2011 number and a bigger $250M being the revenue number for 2012.  This will be in large part because of Twitter’s ability to get big names like Nissan, HP, and Starbucks on board to market there.

Twitter currently has around 175 million users, most of whom follow Ashton Kutcher, but a far cry from Facebook’s 600 million users and Google’s untold legions of users.

The challenge for the 140-or-less micro-blogging platform will be whether they can prove to those new advertisers that they can deliver the goods.  Today’s online marketing campaigns require measurable results and the little startup Twitter will have to demonstrate that they can drive markets towards brands.

The social blogging platform was founded in 2006 and became a sensation in 2009-10 as Hollywood stars and sports and music personalities came on board and began sending tweets from appearances on TV, in the news, and more.  Since then, Twitter has attracted venture capital on a huge scale, now being valued at $3.7 billion after the latest $200M funding round.

Whether Twitter can actually pull off this kind of income is questionable, since it’s profile and user usage profile is so very different from Facebook’s (to whom it’s often erroneously compared).  Twitter users are generally fast and furious posters with little real interaction on a large scale while Facebook’s more in-depth profile-building and network-mapping lends itself to more casual, long-term usage.  This translates (in marketing) to time spent on the site or any given page of it.  It’s likely that metrics would show that the average Facebook user spends much, much more time lingering on a page than does the average Twitter user.

So whether Twitter can deliver the same kind of advertising bombshell that Facebook has been able to build is a very potent question.

Amazon has laid down the law for app developers who want to sell apps in the upcoming Amazon Android App Store.  They will control prices, not developers – a reverse from how Apple and other resellers handle application sales.

Amazon tried similar tactics with booksellers and electronic books and, until last year, got away with it.  Publishers finally banded together and forced Amazon to re-tool their sales strategy, which has resulted in what amounts to an industry-wide norm of $9.99 for an ebook.

App developers may have to do the same, though it’s possible for them to not deal with Amazon at all, since they can sell their apps through other venues.  Of course, given the marketing power of Amazon, this may mean a lot of lost money for some developers.

It will work like this: developers submit apps to Amazon with a suggested retail price.  The price can be anything ($0, $50, $5, whatever), so long as it’s at or below the retail price the app sells for at other venues.  Amazon, however, is not required to go along with that.  They can set the price wherever they’d like.  It’s not all bad for developers, though, as Amazon does agree to pay a minimum 20% of the suggested retail. The normal developer share is 70% of retail.

So it would shake out like this: you set the suggested retail for your app at $10, which would mean you get $7 every time it sells.  Amazon sets the price at $4 on a sale or other incentive, which puts your payout at $2.80.  That’s still higher than the minimum 20% they will pay no matter what.  Now if Amazon decides to give your app away for free?  You still get $2 for every app “sold.”

So although the strategy looks ugly on its face, it’s not a total screw job.  On the other hand, if you have a killer app that sells like hotcakes at other venues and Amazon attempts to undercut those venues by offering it for much less, you lose money too.

In a quick Twitter message this week Groupon claimed that has saved it users an amount of $1bn with its extensive range of local discount offers all over the world.

Discounts on Groupon are substantial, easily around the 50% discount range and considering the company’s size and scope an aggregate ‘savings’ amount of £1bn is by no means unbelievable. The amounts saved on deals is for the most part genuine, with deals often being very comprehensive in their scope and not requiring further purchases to attain the discount. (The notorious ‘service charge not included’ fine print is an exception as the service charge is charged on the full value of the service, not the discounted value.)

It does seem as if discount buying is a growing business, considering the number of copycat services that has been appearing all over the web. Also, Groupon was recently offered a rumored $6bn by Google in an acquisition attempt but the company walked away, going on to raise almost $1bn in capital.

The company operates in over 150 cities in the world and allows sellers in a particular city such as restaurants and beauty parlors to put a limited offer forward for Groupon’s subscribers. These offers last only 24 hours so there is a bit of buying pressure which probably contributes to the success of Groupon. In addition there is only one ‘main’ offer and one ‘extra’ offer per day so users are not overwhelmed by masses of possibly dubious discounted offers.