An article at Yahoo News – Crowdsourcing goes to Hollywood as Amazon makes movies – reveals that Amazon are taking a different approach to greenlighting movies and TV shows than the traditional studios.
Amazon are taking a more data-driven approach to developing and proceeding with projects, relying heavily on testing:
 Amazon first helps develop the scripts it options into trial videos. It posts these online to solicit reviews and feedback from its millions of customers. Writers use the feedback to adjust scripts, hoping to boost the chances of creating a hit when Amazon spends millions of dollars turning projects into full movies or TV shows.
I like the approach. And with 21 movies and nine TV series in development, Amazon are positioned, along with Netflix, as major players in the “financing production” and it’s very consistent with the theme of disintermediation I’ve posted about recently.
If Amazon, Google, and Neflix all approach the problem of getting content by producing some themselves (Funding another 60 channels in Europe), it’s not that fanciful that Apple will take a similar approach (no doubt with an Apple twist) to solving the same problem for their distribution ambitions.