Pre-orders for upcoming HD DVD stayed strong at Amazon.com

Pre-orders for upcoming HD DVD titles stayed strong at Amazon.com. despite Toshiba Corp.'s announcement that it will exit the HD DVD business.
Advanced sales for There Will Be Blood on HD DVD increased 1,341 percent, Sweeney Tood – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street up 1,099 percent, and I Am Legend increased 144 percent by Wed. afternoon.

Amazon this week said it will more prominently promote Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray hardware and software to customers, but continue the sale of HD DVD products.

The HD DVD camp faced a barrage of setbacks last week when Netflix Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc, and Wal-Mart stores said each would back the Blu-ray disc format over HD DVD.

Toshiba on Tues. said it expects to exit the HD DVD business by Mar.

Major retailers this week are offering steep discounts on HD DVD products to move inventory.

Source

Amazon.com Inc.'s data storage service was down for several hours

Amazon.com Inc.'s data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.

As of around noon (EST), the issue had been fixed, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee.

She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but its first priority is to make sure the system is stable.

Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.

A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.

Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end

Source

Amazon.com announces to add MP3 Music store to international web sites

Amazon.com will start selling MP3 music files through its international Web sites this year, the company said Sunday. But details of the company's plans to expand its digital music service remain scarce.

"We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S.," Bill Carr, Amazon's vice president of digital music, in a statement.

Amazon began selling MP3 files without digital rights management technology on its U.S. Web site in September 2007, at prices ranging from US$0.89 to $0.99 per song, and $5.99 to $9.99 per album.

Source