Amazon.com (AMZN) Stock Falls, Targets Apple with Podcast App
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Amazon.com (AMZN) - Get Report are up 0.34% to $735.11 in early-morning trade after the company took a stab at Apple's (AAPL) free podcast service with its pre-existing audiobooks app, Audible.
Starting today, customers with the Audible app can subscribe to Channels, an exclusive selection of ad-free original podcasts, for $4.95 per month. Apple's podcast service is free and ad-supported.
Audible will launch with only a few options but has about 40 other podcasts in production, Bloomberg reports.
Eric Nuzum, the senior vice president of original content at Amazon.com's Audible, said that the podcasting service is a response to the overwhelming number of choices available on competitor's apps. The reduced number of choices are meant to be of higher quality.
"People haven't wrapped their heads around the scale of what we're doing," Nuzum said.
(Amazon.com is held in the Growth Seeker portfolio. See all of the holdings with a free trial).
Separately, TheStreet Ratings rated this stock as a "buy" with a ratings score of B-.
The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its impressive record of earnings per share growth, compelling growth in net income, robust revenue growth, expanding profit margins and solid stock price performance.
TheStreet Ratings feels its strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had generally high debt management risk by most measures that TheStreet Ratings evaluated.
You can view the full analysis from the report here: AMZN
Recently, TheStreet Ratings objectively rated this stock according to its "risk-adjusted" total return prospect over a 12-month investment horizon. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer's view or that of this articles's author.