Amazon's Video On Demand, which began beta testing in July, was officially released in its working form yesterday.

Movie, TV, and Web-exclusive content can now be streamed or downloaded using Amazon Video On Demand. While downloading still requires the Amazon Unbox Video Player, it does make purchased content available for later viewing on PCs, portable devices, as well as media center-connected Xbox 360s. Sony Bravia Internet Video Link and certain TiVo boxes will also enable customers to peruse and purchase Amazon Videos On Demand directly on their TVs.

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Amid charges from LibraryThing of planting blog comments, social networking site Shelfari now belongs 100 percent to Amazon.com. Yet so, too, does AbeBooks, a partial owner of LibraryThing.

Amazon.com today acquired Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers, less than a month after buying AbeBooks, an online retailer of used and rare books. AbeBooks holds an equity stake in LibraryThing, Shelfari's chief rival.

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Fresh analysis indicates that Amazon's popular Kindle device may eventually serve a second purpose: as a provider of college texts and other materials for students. For that reason, Amazon may be marketing the device towards students.

For many college students, a walk between classes is the equivalent of ROTC basic training. The reason, of course, is textbooks. They're too numerous, they're too heavy, and they're too expensive.

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The Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon's block-level persistent storage service for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has come out of beta, offering more security for databases in the event of instance failures.

For companies relying on cloud-based services, the threat of outages looms large. In July, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down for eight hours, dozens of popular sites such as Twitter and SmugMug were disrupted.

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Amazon has rolled out its equivalent of PayPal and Google Checkout in two flavors: Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. Both services fall under the Amazon Payments banner and allow third party retailers to access Amazon user accounts for payment.

The service integrates with Amazon Marketplace as well as third party sites. A "Checkout with Amazon" button takes the user to the Amazon Payments site where they sign into their account and pay for shipping.

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In an attempt to further monetize its DVR offering, TiVo has partnered with online retailer Amazon to allow advertisers to sell products to TiVo users directly through their TV.

The new service is most easily described with this example: an author appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his or her new book. At the end of the show, TiVo pops up a window with an option to purchase the book. TiVo currently embeds advertisements at the bottom of certain windows, which is likely where this offer would appear.

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Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) was down for more than eight hours over the weekend, affecting many prominent sites, and the company is still investigating the cause of the problem.

Cloud-based services such as those offered by Amazon provide cost effective solutions in computing and storage. However, the oft-cited drawback of relying on such offerings is that customers are left with little or no control if something goes wrong. The only option is to wait -- and in cases like this, wait nearly half a day.

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The latest project from the leading online retailer allows movies to be streamed directly to PCs. Built upon Amazon's library of Unbox titles, beta testers get a $5 rental credit to check out the streams.

In May, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos mentioned that an a la carte, pay-per-view streaming video service would be coming to the Site, but did not mention if it would be entirely new, or simply a feature upgrade to Unbox.

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Amazon.com has rolled out deferred billing as an option to customers, realizing an agreement made with Bill Me Later in the beginning of 2008.

As the largest online retailer, Amazon's stock is not limited to items that are normally purchased in one lump sum. From a 6.21 carat diamond for $384,000 to full playground apparatus for $35,000, there is demand for financing on Amazon, and an affiliated partnership currently expedites the process.

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Celebrating the release of British alt-pop group Coldplay's new album "Viva la Vida: or Death and All his Friends," Amazon has taken the opportunity to offer customers the band's entire back catalog for $1.99 per album.

Even though Apple's iTunes has been running "exclusively on iTunes" commercials for Coldplay's newest album since May, "Viva.." is Amazon's top-selling album today. The retailer is now offering the album DRM-free for one dollar cheaper than iTunes.

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Linux software player Red Hat this week entered public beta with a hosted edition of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, its second product to take advantage of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web-based infrastructure.

A hosted version of Red Hat's enterprise software which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was made available last November through Amazon's cloud, and is also still in public beta.

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While Amazon is not disclosing what exactly caused its site to fail for two hours on Friday, the world's largest online retailer may find its problem comes from the site design itself.

Amazon.com first failed around 1:25 pm EDT on Friday. For a two-hour period, customers attempting to access the site were greeted with an error message. Once the site began to return, portions of Amazon remained largely inaccessible.

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An Amazon spokesperson has confirmed to BetaNews that it will be premiering a streaming video service in the upcoming weeks.

At the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California, sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos mentioned that his company has been working on an a la carte, pay-per-view streaming service.

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Amazon has struggled to keep up with orders for its Kindle electronic book reader since the device debuted just before Thanksgiving, but with inventory back on hand, the retailer has lowered the price by 10 percent.

Wait times for customers to receive their Kindle sometimes reached months, leading Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to publish an open letter on the company's homepage in which he apologized for the delays. "We didn't expect the demand that actually materialized," Bezos wrote in March.

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Texas is investigating Amazon.com to see whether the online retailer may owe four years of back sales tax for purchases made by customers in the state, but Amazon claims it has fully complied with the law.

At issue is a distribution facility located in Irving, Texas that the retailer has operated since 2006. Before 2006, Amazon utilized a third party to fulfill orders in the state. The Texas Comptroller's Office is looking into whether the Irving location means Amazon has a physical presence in the state.

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