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Netflix?! Amazon!  

This week online retailer Amazon premiers its first original series: Alpha House 

And boy, do we look forward to it, after seeing both the trailer and the already legendary scene nicknamed the Bill Murray fuck me-bomb. To make a big splash, like Netflix Amazon grabs viewers attention with some honorable names in crew & cast: John Goodman, and Bill Murray notably.

Alpha House is about a lazy Republican senator from South Carolina (Goodman), who loves politics but hates campaigning. He is as tried and tested in the political game as Kevin Spacey 's Francis Underwood, but being the tragicomic actor that he is, in Goodmans hands the political game pretty soon gets pretty funny. The series is produced by political commentator and former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter; writer is Garry Trudeau, from the Doonesbury-cartoon; a household name in America, published daily in for example The Washington Post. Trudeau is also the writer of the HBO series Tanner '88.
The first step of Amazon in ' TV ' is carefully planned, abiding the rules of social media with lots of viewers participation. Just like Netflix, Amazon uses focus groups to see what works. This spring, Amazon customers, 215 million people worldwide, were able to vote for  a total of 14 pilots. Alpha House ended high, as did Betas, a Social Network –sort of story about nerds in Silicon Valley that will premier one week later. The viewer commands; that's tv-production in 2013. In a reaction to the New York Times, Jonathan Alter says it’s ‘refreshing’: ‘You take some power away from the men in suits.’

It's war in the business of online video streaming. All players in that market know you can’t dominate without original content. Parties like Netflix and Amazon want to gain access to your phone, tablet and PC. They want to be part of the world of the viewer, a household name and, as David Carr put it, a go-to party for interesting tv-series.

The first three episodes of Alpha House are free and online November 15th; for the rest you'll have to pay through the online service Amazon Prime Instant Video, which is available only in the U.S. and Canada. The first month is free, after that you pay $79 a year , less than $7 a month. Subscribers have access to 40,000 movies and series, to be watched on everything that has ascreen. Sofar it’s similar to Netflix. But there's one difference: Amazon Instant Video also provides access to books that you can borrow from the vast Kindle Library. And maybe, in the future, customers also get the daily online edition of the Washington Post, now that that newspaper is bought by Amazon. Why not. If you think that's cheap, $7 per month, think again. Research shows, that the average consumer spends a lot more money once he becomes a subscriber. In other words, you go there for Alpha House and end up buying a blender and a pile of underpants, too. @DramaQueenIlse, cinema.nl