Amazon Video could soon be producing its own virtual reality content–that’s what a new job posting by the e-commerce giant suggests.
The posting, on the employment site Glassdoor, seeks to hire someone “responsible for building the Virtual Reality experience within Amazon Video.”
In the job posting, first noticed by Upload VR, Amazon writes that, “Entertainment is evolving rapidly. The future will not be limited to passive 2D experiences. The Virtual Reality team will explore and create the platform and interface for immersive storytelling. This will include an ingestion and playback platform for Virtual Reality experiences.”
It doesn’t say much more about what the company is looking for, beyond laying out some pretty serious qualifications for the job. Those include, beyond a degree in computer science, 15 or more years of relevant engineering work, and seven or more years as a software developer. Interestingly, the posting does not lay out any specific previous experience with virtual reality. That may, of course, be due to the fact that the consumer VR industry is still quite new.
Although Google, Samsung, and a few others have put out low- or middle-end VR hardware over the last year or so, 2016 is definitely the year that the technology is coming of age. This year, Facebook-owned Oculus, HTC’s Vive, and Sony’s PlayStation are all expected to release their high-end VR hardware. Analysts predict that the VR industry as a whole will be worth as much as $30 billion a year by 2025.
The job listing is not the first hint that Amazon has ambitions in the VR space. A patent filing uncovered by The Motley Fool last fall suggested that the tech giant has plans to make its own VR headset.
That patent filing, along with the language in the job posting, suggests that Amazon may want to create both VR hardware and content for it in order to compete with the likes of Facebook and YouTube–both of which have made big pushes into 360-degree video–as well as Oculus and the other major VR players.
Amazon’s biggest competitor in video, Netflix, may also be dipping its toes in the VR waters, Upload VR wrote, noting that Netflix “recently spoke out about a desire to get into the 360-degree content creation scene themselves with the company’s VP of Product Innovation saying ‘we’re very interested in where it could go in storytelling…We’re tracking where that goes.'”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a Fast Company request for comment.
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