According to a report in the Sunday Times (subscription required), Amazon has entered a bid to buy LOVEFiLM that would value the privately-held British company at around £200m.
The internet-shopping giant already owns a sizeable portion of the film-rental service. It made a significant investment as a part of a deal that saw LOVEFiLM purchasing its European rental-operations before acquiring one of the company's venture capital investors. As a result Amazon currently owns 42 per cent of the company, while the remaining shares are held by the management and other investment firms.
The deal would seem to make sense for Amazon. As well as significantly strengthening its online film-rental business, it would gain access to a library and infrastructure to stream on-demand films. While the company offers this service in America under the ‘Amazon VOD' banner, it isn't available in Europe. LOVEFiLM, on the other hand, has a large - and expanding - catalogue of films available to watch instantly on PCs and certain TVs.
For the time being, though, this story is just a rumour. While it was originally reported by the Sunday Times - and repeated by Reuters and the New York Times - the original author failed to cite any sources and neither company has stepped forward confirm or deny the bid. In addition (as pointed out by Thinq), the figure is the same amount that LOVEFiLM was valued at when it was put up for sale over a year ago. Considering that the company has continued to grow over the past year, it seems odd that its value hasn't changed.
