Zunu wrote:Curious...is this from something you recall reading, or something you feel stands to reason on its face?
Translation: "Did you just pull it out of your ass?"
Zunu wrote:Because Amazon Web Services have a redonkulous capacity […] I doubt a few (million) album covers rehosted on blogs and fan pages would matter a jot to them.
They get paid for AWS. They don't get paid for album art. As you say, they have razor thin margins already. And the way these things work, once the content is out there, third-parties would create all sorts of utilities to exploit it and thereby reduce those margins even further.
My own guess is that they overcompress the images because they have determined that serving up blazingly fast low-bandwidth page renders trumps offering high-bandwidth product images in terms of what drives sales and retains customers. […] For Amazon, with their razor thin margins and their proficient analysis of Big Data, even if a process proves to be a fraction of a percent more efficient in attracting/retaining customers over time, they will embrace it.
I don't see the contradiction with what I said: they're avoiding unprofitable consumption of bandwidth. You're just approaching it from the other direction. You say "They're saving bandwidth," I say "They're not wasting bandwidth." Glass half-empty, glass half-full.