I look at this from an economics perspective. Tidal and Qobuz are not yet profitable.
Even Spotify with 100 milllion customers is losing money. This from Spotify's Q2 earnings report:
"Operating Losses totaled €3 million yielding an Operating Margin of (0.2%)"
BTW that's better than they have ever done, and most of their revenue comes from the paid premium service.
Tidal and Qobuz are privately held, so finaniclas are opaque. But in my view they are financial time bombs.
Amazon has a massive global web hosting capability - arguably the largest. AWS also accounts for most of their profits. Their infrastructure costs for storage and egress (streaming) are going to be lower than Tidal and Qobuz by a wide margin.
Amazon has the infrastructure and financial power to prevail. That's if the content owners will play ball with them, which I suspect they will.
Having worked with Amazon Alexa - they will publish all the API's needed for Roon to access thier service, and they will help them get going, but it will be up to Roon to do all the work required to integrate Amazon Music HD into their platform.
Like a character in Game of Thrones, I wouldn't get too attached to your favorite streaming service just yet.
Tom
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Last edited by W9TR; 09-19-2019 at 08:04 AM.
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