GigaOM’s flagship event and (in my somewhat biased opinion) the best enterprise-computing conference on the planet will feature several high-profile executives of this world (Amazon’s Werner Vogels, VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella) as well as startups hoping to hand those bigger companies their lunch in a few years. We’ll highlight all our coverage from UCSF-Mission Bay in this post, so make sure to check back.

A livestream of the event can be found here. You can also check out the discussion on Twitter by following @gigaom and using the hashtag #structureconf. Hope to see you all there.

Day 1:

• AMD executive: The data center is changing and ARM will be the compute
• Rewire and experiment: why complex IT is better
• Microsoft sees itself as one of the public-cloud horsemen, but time will tell
• Why CMOs and CTOs are sharing the IT load
• Joyent CTO: The convergence of data and compute will disrupt global profits
• Meet Facebook’s new network architecture: it’s a fabric
• Google’s Jeff Dean talks about infrastructure, focus and recognizing cats
• Why VMware isn’t flinching as Amazon’s cloud keeps growing
• When it comes to a new networking OS, Linux is the Linux of networking
• How Twitter is using ThousandEyes to monitor operations
• Workday CEO Bhusri on why the company’s next big bet is finance
• How lipstick maker Revlon turned around its business with IT
• Software is important to networking, and Juniper is on it
• Vogels: Everyone wants Amazon cloud everywhere
• Fidelity Investments joins the OpenStack crowd
• How streaming can fit into the big data toolbox
• Open Compute is bringing the maker movement to the enterprise
• Picking the cloud’s winners and losers: From SaaS to SDN

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
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First up, Amazon announced it’s added “more than a thousand books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows to Kindle FreeTime Unlimited,” its monthly subscription streaming offering for kids. Not surprisingly, Amazon didn’t provide subscriber numbers — though Kindle VP Peter Larsen said “the vast majority of our customers who take advantage of our one month free trial of FreeTime Unlimited choose to subscribe and enjoy our content library built just for kids.”

Of course, Amazon’s announcement refers to the Viacom shows that it grabbed exclusive rights to after Netflix lost them: “Among the content on FreeTime Unlimited are “exclusive Nick Jr. favorites from Viacom such as Dora The Explorer, Go, Diego, Go!, Blue’s Clues and The Backyardigans.”

Then Netflix announced that it’s launched a separate section of its site called Netflix Families, which “helps parents with the daunting task of entertaining kids this summer.” The site offers family recommendations in different categories (“family movie night,” etc.) as well as videos from parents about how they are “embracing the ease and flexibility of Netflix.” And Netflix notes that “Netflix works on almost any device with a broadband, WiFi or mobile data connection” — while Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is only available for the Kindle Fire.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / jwblinn

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All of this is key to its industrial intent vision, where connected sensors on machines talk to the cloud and companies harness the power of industrial data in real time to automate industrial processes. GE has estimated that connecting devices to the “industrial internet” could boost global GDP to the tune of $10 trillion to $15 trillion by 2030.

GE’s new data and cloud products

GE is building big data software called the Historian that uses Hadoop to manage time-series data to help industrial customers track their rising industrial data. GE’s Bill Ruh, VP of the Global Software Center, pointed out that industrial data is growing at twice the rate of other types of data. For example, GE generates about 5 terabytes of data a day in its labs.

The Hadoop part of the software allows the data to scale across multiple nodes, while the time-series component helps manage the influx of tiny pieces of data that comes in almost constantly. Time-series data isn’t huge, but it’s always coming in, adding up to millions and billions of records over a relatively short amount of time depending on how often it is collected.

The partnership with Amazon (Amazon CTO Werner Vogels attended the event, and he’ll also speak at our Structure event tomorrow in San Francisco) means the cloud giant will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its industrial internet platform. It’s not clear yet, if Amazon will use GE’s Hadoop software in its cloud or if there are just some API links being built.

Update: Vogels and Ruh say that the relationship means that customers can ship and store their data designed for the GE Predictivy software and the Historian platform to Amazon’s cloud. So customers can do it on-premise and/or in the cloud. Pivotal will help build some of the software connectors that will make it possible for customers to use this data where they want without concerning themselves about where it is headed.

In some ways the demonstrations that GE showed off, are taking direct design strategies from consumer applications such as Facebook, and its software options, called Predictivity are designed to connect the data coming in from machines to people in user-friendly ways.

The goal behind all of these products is to bring the internet of things back to the enterprise realm. It’s nice to connect your home, but when you can connect power plants you can drive a lot more results in terms of energy efficiency and even cost savings. And because the money is there, we’ll see a lot of interesting software to solve the problems associated with managing, analyzing and running predictions against data.

“Now for the first time I think we’re going to see innovation coming out of the industrial space and not just the IT space, “said Paul Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal, a company that GE recently invested $105 million in.

I’ll update the story with more information after the event.

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• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

One big change is that BigQuery can now run more statistical calculations on data, such as percentiles and ranking of query results. What’s more, BigQuery will return larger data sets as a result of queries. Previously, there was a limit of 128MB of compressed data; now that is no more, in response to customer requests, according to a Google blog post from BigQuery Product Manager Ju-Kay Kwek and another one from Cloud Platform team member Felipe Hoffa.

Also, query results can now stay cached for a day, so analysts looking to just read results that stay the same can save some money. An updated interface lets users know right away if the syntax of their queries contains errors, and if everything is kosher, it will provide an estimate for the cost of the query.

Additionally, Google is doubling the size limits on queries. More detail is available from Hoffa’s blog post.

And on July 1, prices will drop from 12 cents per gigabyte per month down to 8 cents per gigabyte per month. The biggest users will apparently be eligible in the future to sign up for tiered query pricing, too.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers from Microsoft to Rackspace have become quiet adept at cutting prices and adding features, as competition keeps heating up. Market leader Amazon Web Services is arguably the king of price cuts, and in fact on Monday it struck again by slashing the prices of its Relational Database Service (RDS) instances.

Google has lowered the prices of its own cloud services before, too, on Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage and Google Compute Engine instances. BigQuery can be considered more of a Software as a Service play, although like GCE and others, it’s part of the Google’s broader IaaS strategy.

BigQuery is already a fast solution for running SQL-style interactive queries on large data sets. Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure: Data conference last year, Kwek (pictured) played up BigQuery as an analytics tool offering much faster speeds than what’s possible on premise, without having to store that data on site. (Don’t miss GigaOM’s Structure conference next week, at which Google Fellow and MapReduce paper co-author Jeff Dean will make an appearance.) With the price cuts and new features, BigQuery looks more palatable, and that boosts the prospects of the larger Cloud Platform.

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Amazon launched a Chinese Kindle store, with iOS and Android apps for reading ebooks, in December. The store contained around 25,000 ebooks at launch and is now up to about 47,000 titles. When I surfed around a Google Translated version of the store today, I noticed that the device page translates as “Optional Kindle device,” perhaps to remind users that they don’t actually have to buy a Kindle in order to read ebooks. Most of the books in the Chinese Kindle store are priced very, very low, with the top 15 bestselling books in the store all priced under 3 yuan (USD $0.49) and many at 1 yuan (USD $0.16).

Amazon also launched an Android app store in China last month.

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UPDATE 2: Less blasé reactions are now starting to roll in. That link will also take you to a revised statement from the European Commission, which now concedes this may not be just an internal U.S. matter.

This is a great day to be a conspiracy theorist. Vindication! The National Security Agency – part of the U.S. military – reportedly has a direct line into the systems of some of the world’s biggest web and tech companies, all of which are of course sited in the U.S.

The companies themselves – Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and so on – have denied the existence of these backdoors, but the U.S. authorities have not. They have claimed there are unspecified inaccuracies in the reports carried by The Guardian and The Washington Post, but there has been no substantive denial, other than to say it’s all OK because only non-U.S. citizens outside the U.S. are being targeted.

That last part appears to be nonsense, hence the uproar within the U.S., but let’s for a moment take the Obama administration at its word and pretend it’s not spying on its own citizens. Even in this scenario, the fallout will be tremendous outside American borders.

Great timing

And nowhere more so than in Europe, which is already in the throes of a wide-ranging debate over data privacy. The EU’s new data protection laws are being formulated, with treats in store including enhanced responsibilities for non-EU cloud firms when it comes to protecting the privacy of European citizens. This has prompted a pretty shameless lobbying campaign by U.S. tech firms to see the new rules watered down. Activist members of the European Parliament (MEPs) such as Jan Philipp Albrecht have been fighting back.

Guess which side of this battle just got a boost?

@superglaze Europeans should insist on having their #dataprotection laws applied to their data. This is why we need #EUdataP. #nsa #privacy—
Jan Philipp Albrecht (@JanAlbrecht) June 07, 2013

Unsafe Harbor?

But what about the current EU data protection rules? Time for a quick primer: it is illegal for EU citizens’ personal data to be processed – that includes being hosted on servers — outside the EU, unless the company doing the processing/hosting is in a country that has data protection laws of as high a standard as you find in the EU. The U.S. does not conform to these standards, but of course most of the big web firms are American, so to get around this there is something called a Safe Harbor agreement between the U.S. and Europe.

The Safe Harbor scheme (not recognized by the Germans, incidentally) allows U.S. tech firms such as Google to self-certify, to say that they conform to EU-style data protection standards even if their country’s laws do not. It’s not quite that simple – these companies really do need to jump through some hoops before they claim compliance; just ask Heroku — but it does largely come down to trust.

EU data protection regulators have already called for the system to be toughened up through the introduction of third-party audits, but frankly it now looks like the whole system is in tatters. U.S. companies claiming Safe Harbor compliance include Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL, all of which now appear to be part (willingly or otherwise) of the NSA’s PRISM scheme.

As EU data protection rules don’t say it’s OK for foreign military units to record or monitor the communications of European citizens – heck, even local governments aren’t supposed to be doing that – the Safe Harbor program now looks questionable to say the least. A lot of people have already pointed to the U.S. Patriot Act as a threat, and now the effects of that legislation are plain to see.

Cloud impact

All of this is likely to prove very problematic indeed for U.S. cloud firms trying to push further into the European market.

Imagine you’re a European government wanting to move your IT systems into the cloud. For some, nationalism and protectionism already come into play at this point – witness the French (of course) and the two national clouds that they have under development.

Now imagine you’re a U.S. firm trying to drum up business in that context. You can say you have an EU data center and you’re even willing to set up a mini-cloud in the country, just to put everyone’s mind at rest. You can say it and you can mean it, but can you really be surprised when you get laughed at because everyone now sees U.S. internet companies as being in league with the NSA? Even if you’re Amazon, which isn’t part of PRISM, you have a problem.

But that’s just business. The NSA revelations will have a far worse impact than that.

Goodbye moral high ground

This is where it gets really depressing. It’s not like previous U.S. statements on internet freedom in places such as China and the Middle East have emerged without some pointing out the perceived hypocrisy of it all. But now those people, who may have seemed a tad on the paranoid side at the time, can slip into told-you-so mode.

Let’s be clear about this: the NSA’s PRISM program is not quite the same thing as what the Chinese have in place. We’re not talking about overt clamping-down on freedom of speech, or the blocking of certain terms on microblogs when anti-government stories are doing the rounds.

But whatever is happening with the data being collected, the very fact that it is being collected means governments doing much worse things can now turn around and call the U.S. a hypocrite every time it tries to criticize them. At the very least, the perception of U.S. online freedom will no longer be what it was earlier this week – but it is possible that these latest revelations will lead some authoritarian regimes to be a little less cautious with their own online crackdowns.

The PRISM leak is going to be damaging for U.S. firms and the country’s image abroad, but its long-term effects may be worse than that.

But hey, lemons to lemonade, right? If you’re a web firm – particularly one dealing in communications of any kind – based in a country with meaningful data protection rules and checks on governmental intrusion, you now have a pretty strong selling point that wasn’t so clear a few days ago. We’re still waiting for the official reaction to emanate from data protection authorities here in Europe, but there’s every chance that they will be giving their citizens a strong steer in that direction.

And while we’re trying to see the upside:

So, who else is pumped about Google Glass?—
PRISM US Gov (@PRISM_NSA) June 06, 2013

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Kindling on the fire

First up on Thursday was VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti, whose testimony continued from the previous day and who was questioned by Apple attorney Howard Heiss. Heiss sought to demonstrate that Amazon needed participation from all of the Big 6 publishers in order to launch the Kindle Store in 2007,; to make it clear that Amazon was aware of publishers’ dislike of the $9.99 price point long before Apple came on the scene; and to show that Amazon had reasons of its own to switch to agency pricing, beyond the notion that Apple’s launch of the iBookstore forced it to.

Grandinetti insisted that he didn’t know what Amazon’s market share was for ebooks in 2009. “Would you agree that Amazon was the dominant ebook retailer?” Heiss asked. Grandinetti said he was “not sure.” “Can we agree on your definition of ‘dominant’?” Heiss asked more testily, citing the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary, “which I believe Amazon uses” (it’s built into the Kindle).

Heiss then cited a 2010 CNET interview with an Amazon Kindle VP, Ian Freed, which was headlined “Amazon: We have 70-80 percent of ebook market.” “Do you know. Where Mr. Freed got the metrics. The data. The information,” Heiss said. Grandinetti responded that Freed was “probably relying on publisher reports.” (Judge Cote later noted that the CNET interview was from 2010, while Heiss had been asking Grandinetti about 2009.)

Heiss asked if Grandinetti was aware of publishers’ dislike of the $9.99 price for New York Times bestselling Kindle books. It “wasn’t secret,” he suggested. Grandinetti agreed, “It was not.” And Heiss referenced an October 2009 email from Kindle VP David Naggar to Grandinetti, which read in part, “The debate is RAGING and the next 6-9 months is when all the battles are going to be fought.”

What did Amazon know?

Heiss sought to show that Amazon was not unfamiliar with agency pricing before Apple launched the iBookstore. For instance, he noted that Amazon already used the agency model for newspapers, periodicals and some music. In addition, he noted that in 2009, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both reported that Big 6 publishers were considering withholding new ebooks from retailers, releasing them a few months after new hardcovers — a practice known as windowing, which was intended to protect print sales from being cannibalized by ebook sales, and which publishers were considering because Amazon’s ebook prices were so low. In other words, Heiss wanted to remind the court that Amazon needed to consider forces beyond Apple when it was deciding whether to offer publishers an alternative to wholesale pricing.

In the most fraught section of Grandinetti’s testimony, Heiss referred to a section of Grandinetti’s deposition in which Grandinetti said that, following the introduction of agency pricing, ebook prices went up “across the board.” This was an “impression,” Grandinetti said. “You weren’t looking at any data?” Heiss asked. “This was anecdotal review by you?” Heiss then went on to cite “Amazon data” that showed that statistics showing that four publishers actually lowered prices on many NYT bestsellers after the introduction of agency pricing.

“In the aggregate, prices went up,” Grandinetti said cautiously. At this point, Heiss yelled at Grandinetti for turning to Amazon’s lawyer, who was sitting a few feet away from the witness stand: “WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT MR. KIPLING?” “Mr. Heiss, please,” Judge Cote admonished.

Heiss wanted Grandinetti to admit that Amazon didn’t put much thought or data-driven analysis into its $9.99 pricing strategy — to suggest that the company simply chose $9.99 because it was cheap. Grandinetti countered that publishers lacked Amazon’s “specific knowledge” on pricing. “I take it that coming up with the $9.99 price didn’t offer any specific algorithm,” Heiss said, to which Grandinetti responded, “Simplicity can be sophisticated.”

Grandinetti was followed by Kindle VP David Naggar, whom Heiss questioned about contract negotiations with publishers. In particular, Heiss wondered whether it was reasonable to expect that publishers would not compare amongst themselves the contract terms that Amazon offered them. ”We would let them know that we weren’t asking anything different from them than we were asking from others,” Naggar answered.

“When you told publishers that, did you simply expect them to take it on faith that you were being truthful with them?” Heiss asked. Naggar responded, “Yes.”

The day’s last witness from Amazon was Laura Porco, who was formerly a director of Kindle books and now works for Amazon’s MyHabit.com. Most of Heiss’s questions for Porco centered around her email exchanges with Madeline McIntosh, who was at Amazon from 2008 to 2009 (she worked for Porco) and is now the COO of Random House.

In particular, Heiss referenced one email exchange in which McIntosh referred to Porco’s belief that the Big 6 would never sign agency contracts unless they were offered 90-10 terms (in which the retailer would take only a 10 percent share; ultimately, the agency contracts that the publishers signed with Apple and Amazon offered a 70-30 split). ”What we never figured was that five publishers would band together and insist on worse terms,” McIntosh wrote in one of the emails, and Porco wrote back, “Hysterical, isn’t it? Jedi mind tricks here in Seattle.”

According to Apple, the meaning of this email exchange was that McIntosh was being ironic publishers had actually agreed to 70-30 agency terms — a worse deal for them. Heiss also noted that a “Jedi mind trick” is a Star Wars reference, referring to the ability to get someone to do something they don’t want to do. Porco claimed, however, that McIntosh was being entirely straightforward and that by “worse” terms, she meant “worse than wholesale,” not worse than a 90-10 revenue split. As for the “Jedi mind tricks” reference, Porco told Heiss, “I was being very sarcastic in this email and it was quite the opposite.” McIntosh would understand this, Porco said, because she had worked at Amazon.

Google’s turn in the hot seat

Thursday ended with testimony from Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google. Turvey was questioned by Apple attorney Orin Snyder, who concentrated his questioning on Turvey’s deposition — which Turvey was asked to provide by the government, and which Turvey prepared in partnership with government counsel.

In particular, Snyder slammed Turvey repeatedly for a sentence in the testimony in which Turvey said he was “directly advised” by publishers that their agency contracts with Apple would not allow them to enter wholesale contracts with other retailers, like Google — when, in fact, other Google emails showed that this wasn’t true. (Macmillan, for instance, had told Google that it could do either a wholesale or agency contract).

“I don’t recall whether I wrote these words directly or with counsel,” Turvey admitted. Snyder, who swigged from miniature bottles of water throughout the questioning and was clearly enjoying himself, persisted: “You cannot attach a name or a face…you can’t recall a single phone call…” Turvey responded, “My recollection is that these events happened. I can’t tell you with whom.” At five, Judge Cote cut Snyder off: “We’ll let Mr. Turvey escape so he can begin to enjoy his Thursday.”

Snyder also couldn’t help getting in a few digs at Google’s media business. “Would you agree Google is a powerful company in the media and entertainment space?” he asked. Turvey responded, “No, I would not.” (At another point, Snyder began talking about Apple succeeding in the ebook market where Google failed. Judge Cote interrupted: “No, no, no, Mr. Snyder. Bring it home.”)

“Do you own an iPad?” Snyder asked. Turvey said, “I do not.”

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• Grandinetti argued that the publishers’ switch to the agency model was intended to “slow down the success of the Kindle,” Reuters reports, but as is well known by now, the company ultimately agreed to switch to agency in order to keep the ebooks in its store, signing three-year deals in which Amazon would take a 30 percent cut of each sale.
• One of the main points of the DOJ’s case is that Apple was a “facilitator and go-between” in encouraging publishers to require agency contracts with other retailers (namely, Amazon). Publishers Marketplace reports, “[Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn] Reidy argued that Apple did not require the publisher to move Amazon and other accounts to the agency model. ‘We had the option of not doing that,’ Reidy said. ‘We wanted to do that,’ she indicated, because under the MFN clause, in not doing so they would ‘make even less money.’ At another point, Reidy said, ‘we wouldn’t have signed a contract that said let Apple tell us what we had to do with other retailers.’ A related, charged point raised by the government was an internal mail to the S&S team on January 4, in which Reidy writes in part about how to respond to Eddy Cue’s proposed Apple terms, noting that ‘we are in total agreement that…agency model should hold for all retailers.’”
• Amazon’s new publisher contracts (as well as Barnes & Noble’s new contracts) also contained most-favored-nation (MFN) clauses. As the Wall Street Journal notes: ”Mr. Grandinetti’s testimony underscored one of the quirks of the government’s case against Apple: Once Amazon moved to the so-called agency model, it negotiated the same terms that the Justice Department has pronounced unenforceable in the Apple contracts, including a provision that said if another retailer were selling a book at a lower price, the publisher would have to match the lower price in Amazon’s digital bookstore.”
• The New York Times reports that “Ms. Reidy called an executive at Paramount Pictures to verify Apple’s claim that a 30 percent commission on sales in their iTunes store — which she considered too high — was standard.”

On Thursday, Grandinetti is expected to finish his testimony. After that, two more Amazon executives — VP of Kindle content David Naggar and general merchandise manager Laura Porco (who was previously director of Kindle books) — are scheduled to take the stand, followed by Google director of strategic partnerships Thomas Turvey. We’ll be in court.

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In fact, the government’s case is so compelling that the judge in the trial has already said she thinks it will prevail, despite Apple’s protests to the contrary. In pretrial comments, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said she believes the government “will be able to show at trial direct evidence that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books, and that the circumstantial evidence in this case will confirm that.”

Apple: Amazon made us do it

Not surprisingly, Apple has complained that this amounts to pre-judging the case, but it’s not hard to see how the judge arrived at that conclusion: Emails sent from Steve Jobs and other Apple executives to various publishers as they tried to strike a deal make it obvious that the computer company wanted to see a united front from the book industry before it agreed to any terms, and that it essentially pressured publishers to collude in order to achieve that.

In the run-up to the antitrust trial, Apple and the Big Five publishers who were named in the lawsuit tried to make their case in the court of public opinion, and their argument was that while their behavior may have looked an awful lot like collusion, they needed to do so in order to blunt the effect of Amazon’s virtual monopoly over e-books — which they suggested was a far worse danger than cutting a deal with Apple, the underdog in the market.

In an open letter about the case published a year ago, Macmillan CEO John Sargent denied that his company colluded with anyone when it decided to move to what is called the “agency model” of pricing (in which the publisher gets to set the price for e-books, rather than the retailer), and argued that doing this was necessary to blunt the force of Amazon’s hold on the market. At the end of the letter, he quoted Authors’ Guild president Scott Turow:

“The irony of this bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition. This would be tragic for all of us who value books and the culture they support.”

Were consumers harmed?

Very little of this is likely to be part of Apple’s legal arguments in the current trial, for the simple reason that it would never fly as an excuse for encouraging or facilitating collusion and price-fixing. If the major players in an industry get together and effectively agree on a strategy for keeping prices artificially high, it’s not enough to say “But your honor, we had to do this because our competitor is too large and it was the only way we could compete with them.”

As we’ve tried to point out in posts about the accusations against Google for its behavior, antitrust law in the U.S. isn’t designed to help prevent competitors from being squashed by a large player in an industry — even if that player has what amounts to a monopoly position. The key point is whether that particular company’s behavior alters or damages the marketplace in a way that harms consumers. And when it comes to that, the DoJ is on rock-solid ground.

As the Justice Department pointed out in its opening statement, the price of e-books climbed by as much as 50 percent in the weeks following Apple’s agreement with the Big Five publishers. Those two groups can — and have, on many occasions — make the argument that keeping prices higher than they would have been otherwise is in the long-term interests of the publishing industry (although that is also debatable), but that’s not what the DoJ or the court is interested in.

Apple took a risk, and it lost

Apple’s only argument is that while e-book prices rose and stayed high for some time as a result of its actions, they eventually came back down — but the judge is unlikely to find that persuasive either. In effect, Apple would be saying: “Yes, we colluded with publishers, but our attempt to keep prices artificially high eventually failed due to other market conditions we were powerless to affect.” That’s admitting guilt, but hoping to get a pass anyway.

So why is Apple bothering to fight this case, even though it knows that it will probably lose? Some of it could be sheer bloody-mindedness, but the company may also be worried about the potential implications of the ruling as it pertains to what are called “most-favored nation” agreements, which give partners the right of first refusal when it comes to pricing. As Zach Seward notes at Quartz, these agreements are everywhere in the entertainment business, and if they amount to collusion then Apple could find it harder to strike deals in other areas.

The bottom line is that Apple engaged in risky behavior with publishers because it felt it had to do so in order to break Amazon’s iron grip on e-books, and offering higher prices to publishers if they cut a deal with the company seemed like the best way to do that. Apple may even have been correct in that assessment — but collusion is still collusion. The only question now is how large the judgement against the company will be in terms of damages.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / tlegend

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Some of those will be exclusive — the press release doesn’t make clear which ones, but an Amazon spokeswoman verified for me that Nick Jr. shows like Dora, Blue’s Clues and The Backyardigans will be exclusive to Prime, while Nickeloden shows like SpongeBob are exclusive “in terms of digital video subscription services”  but will still be available through sources like Viacom’s Nickelodeon app. From the release:

“Prime members will now have unlimited instant streaming access to popular kids programming such as Bubble Guppies, The Backyardigans, Team Umizoomi, Blue’s Clues and Victorious, along with top-rated shows from MTV and Comedy Central like Awkward, Tosh.0 and Workaholics. Prime members will also have access to future episodes of Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, Fairly Odd Parents, Fresh Beat Band and more. LOVEFiLM customers in the UK and Germany will get some of the same great shows later this summer.”

Some shows from Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. will also be available through Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, Amazon’s monthly content subscription service for kids.

A source tells AllThingsD that this is “the company’s biggest licensing outlay to date,” but the company has been working hard to lock down exclusive streaming rights for awhile. This year, for instance, it got those rights to Downton Abbey: Starting June 18, Amazon will be the only place that viewers can stream the third season of the BBC hit, with seasons 1 and 2 going exclusive later in the year. It also has exclusives on FX’s Justified and the CBS Stephen King summer drama Under the Dome.

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