amaon

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says in a few weeks the company will launch a streaming video service. How's that different from Amazon Unbox? When you purchase or rent a movie from Amazon Unbox, the video is downloaded to your computer. While you can start watching before the download is complete, streaming video services like Hulu and Netflix allow you to start watching videos immediately.

There's one other major problem with Amazon Unbox: The video player and download client only work with Windows XP and Vista. There's no way to purchase videos from the site if you're a Linux or Mac user. It's not 100% clear whether the new streaming video service will be cross-platform. But we can certainly hope, can't we?

The streaming video service will be pay-per-view. It doesn't sound like there will be any kind of subscription option. And that's about all we know so far.