Splitsider

Amazon announced today that it will begin distributing comedy and children's programming directly to the consumer through their video streaming service, Amazon Instant Video. Amazon joining Netflix in the programming business is another step towards the content creation paradigm shift. Standard television ratings are plummeting, as people are looking for new ways to consume media. Amazon's hook is they are opening up submissions to anyone with a five-page treatment and a pilot script, which is everyone under 35 at this point. Once a month, they will choose a project and option it for $55,000, which a contact in the television industry explained, is about what cable networks [...]

According to the WSJ, Amazon is following in Netflix and Hulu's footsteps, prepping a service that will stream movies and TV shows for a flat monthly fee. This is interesting in theory, but in practice it will only be interesting if they can get a lot of content providers on board. If they're just gonna clone Netflix's selection, there's no real point in paying for the same thing twice. We really need a fully-stocked streaming service that offers up as close to everything as possible! No one wants to pay the same price as a cable subscription to a half-dozen different services to get full content coverage.

Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist Way is set to drop November 1, but if your curiosity for all things nerd must be satiated now, check out the final cover on Amazon…now.

Maybe you don't have a TV. Maybe you don't want to pay for cable, or rent a satellite dish. Maybe you don't like accommodating the odd and conflicting schedules of competing armies of shows, or maybe you just slip out of sync every once in a while. Sometimes you can't watch what you want to watch, and it would be nice to just be able to catch up online, preferably for free. Here's how to do that.