Amazon.com, Inc. may be looking to enter the live streaming television space with the company said to have been in talks to do exactly that.

Dan Rayburn broke the news, writing on his Streaming Media blog that multiple content owners have told him that Amazon has been quietly asking them about licensing content for a live streaming service, and that other companies involved in the video ecosystem have also confirmed that Amazon is looking at potentially offering a live over-the-top (OTT) video service of some kind.

Bloomberg Business dug deeper and discovered that some of the companies Amazon has held talks with include CBS Corp. and Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal; the talks are said to be preliminary at this point with some having occurred several months ago.

To make things more interesting Amazon recently acquired Elemental Technologies, Inc. in September for $500 million and Elemental’s primary business: online video solutions and distribution. This means that Amazon already owns a platform on which it could provide a live streaming service.

A new Amazon live television streaming service would provide a complimentary product for its existing Amazon Prime video on demand service, while also going head-to-head with cable television providers including Time-Warner and Comcast at a time where the phenomenon of “cord-cutters” (people canceling their cable TV subscriptions) is starting to gather pace.

On the internet front there are already similar services provided by Sony Corp. (Playstation Vue) and Dish Network.

Apple has also shown an interest in introducing a live TV streaming product however the delay there is due to a different usage model; whereas presumably any service from Amazon would be provided as part of Amazon Prime membership complete with a yearly set price, Apple wants to offer an a la carte option where people pay a fee per channel, not unlike they can now rent a movie from the iTunes store now, a model that upsets the traditional bundling of channels currently prevalent in the cable TV industry.

Competition is good

While it’s unclear what a potential Amazon live TV streaming service would look like, or even at this stage whether it might go ahead, whatever they offer will be good, because ultimately all competition is good.

On-demand streaming services such as those provided by Amazon itself, Netflix, Inc., and even Hulu, Inc. are seriously starting to disrupt the legacy one size fits all model provided by incumbent cable TV providers but the missing link for cord-cutters is live television and particularly live sports; if Amazon could get live streaming rights to say Fox (Major League Baseball) and CBS and NBC (football), that’s going to give them a huge advantage in its ongoing appeal to sign up people who may be currently wavering about coming across from their existing cable TV service.

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