After its local-language Korean sci-fi drama Squid Game ascended to the top of the audience charts in 90 countries in just over a week, freaking out ISPs over its associated traffic demands in some cases, Netflix received a rather conspicuous hat tip from one of its biggest streaming rivals. 

". @ReedHastings and Ted Sarandos and the team at @Netflix get it right so often. Their internationalization strategy isn’t easy, and they’re making it work. Impressive and inspiring. (And I can’t wait to watch the show.)," tweeted Amazon founder and aspiring astronaut Jeff Bezos on Saturday. 

Is this an indicator that Amazon Studios will soon reorganize itself and start developing more local-language shows, like the nine-part Squid Game?

Responding to a follow-up query, Bezos tweeted, "No, just simple admiration."

Also read: 'Squid Game,' Netflix's Latest Inexplicable Hit (Review)

Regardless, the recognition capped a stunning emergence for the dystopian limited series about an island full of kids games, in which the adult winners take home huge cash prizes, while the losers simply die. 

Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game debuted Sept. 17 in the U.S., a subtitled series with no discernible brand recognition. 

By Sept. 27, the show was ranked as "No. 1 in the U.S," when Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told tech impresario Kara Swisher at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills that Squid Game was pacing to become the streaming service's most watched show ever. 

In the realm of social media, meanwhile, the hashtag #SquidGame has been viewed on TikTok more than 23 million times. 

In Korea, the show has been so avidly streamed that local internet services provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix, claiming that the associated traffic spike has generated unreasonable network maintenance costs. 

Scoring a strong 93% from critical review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes--but given a decided meh by our own fussy critic--Squid Game has become the poster child for Netflix's local-language strategy, with the streaming company dispersing its programming development resources to disparate hot spots all over the world. 

Interviewed by Vulture late last week, Netflix's global TV chief, Bela Bajaria, said that she, along with Minyoung Kim, whose content chief of the Asia-Pacific region that includes Korea, expected big things from Squid Game, since Korean dramas have grown their audiences by a collective 200% on Netflix over the previous two years. 

“We always knew it was going to be a signature title for Korea, but there’s no way to have anticipated it would be this big," Bajaria said. 

Ad-supported streaming service Haystack News is launching pop-up channels in July focusing on the issue of gun violence, the Olympic Games and the launch of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin flight into space.

“These are remarkable times we are living in and Haystack News is proud to be the most innovative news platform of choice for our growing user base. Haystack’s July channels will highlight the tragedy and triumph of our times, covering the wonderment of space exploration, the Olympic spirit, and the scourge of gun violence in the United States,” said Daniel Barreto, co-founder and CEO of Haystack TV.

The Gun Violence in America channel is slated to run from Monday to July 19 looking at how communities are tackling the problem as crime rises in the summer.

The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics channel also launches Monday and will present local U.S. TV station coverage of competing athletes before, during and after the games.

The Blue Origin First Space Passenger Space Flight channel will be on the service July 19 and 20 as the billionaire launches himself into the sky. The channel also marks National Space Exploration Day and the 52d anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Amid all the conversations about whether Netflix is flagging, Disney Plus is taking off, HBO Max and Peacock are finding their feet, or Discovery Plus and Paramount Plus will matter, few seemed to take notice of what's happening over at Amazon Prime Video. 

But this past week provided lots of reminders that no one should discount the SVOD side hustle from the super-sized Seattle e-commerce and cloud-computing giant, which is coming off a notable week. 

First, the company's shows grabbed two technical Oscars (the gripping Sound of Metal, for Best Sound and Film Editing), among 12 nominations across four fine films. Its features and series previously had picked up three Golden Globes, including Best Actor for John Boyega's turn in Steve McQueen's extraordinary limited-run series Small Axe, and two comedy/musical  awards (which the Oscars don't recognize and seldom notice) for Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. 

Awards certainly aren't everything. But they are something. As Netflix suggested earlier in awards season, even nominations can drive a big bump in viewership, especially for smaller projects (If Anything Happens I Love You, which went on to win Best Animated Short, saw a four-digit jump in viewership in the week after it was nominated, Netflix said.  

Just as importantly, awards attention helps shine up the prestige of that catalog, so subscribers and potential customers know they're getting some quality with their quantities of viewing experiences. 

And after wrapping up a solid awards season, Amazon finally clarified one of the biggest questions in streaming: how many people actually watch the decade-old Amazon Prime Video?

The company has regularly disclosed the number of subscribers to Amazon Prime, which entitles you to free shipping and has been a crucially sticky part of Amazon's rise to primacy in e-commerce. But it's been much more more difficult to find out how many of those subscribers also dialed in to Prime Video or even took advantage of free music, books, magazines and video game assets that are also part of Prime. 

Well, it’s a secret no more. After a locked-down year sent pandemic shoppers flocking to Amazon Prime, most of them also checked out Prime Video shows such as The Boys, Jack Ryan, Them, Coming2America, Invincible, and The Expanse.The service also rolled out a raft of international originals, such as La Templanza, Guerra de Likes, Paatal Lok, and We Children From Bahnhof Zoo. 

And unlike fellow FAANG Apple, Amazon has invested heavily in catalog content to fill out its spending on originals, so customers have something to watch after they plow through the marquee shows. 

The results, disclosed in this week's earnings call and Jeff Bezos' last investor letter as CEO (he moves to executive chairman in July), are startling. The service has 175 million users, second only to long-time competitor Netflix (at 208 million), and well ahead of Disney Plus,  at something over 100 million. 

And those customers are using the services a lot. CFO Brian Olsavsky said during the earnings call this past week that streaming hours on Prime Video were up more than 70% over the past year. Clearly, for all the horrible things the pandemic has done to the country and world, it's been very good for Amazon in this area too. 

Olsavsky also suggested Amazon soon may start attracting even more viewers, thanks to its burgeoning investments in live sports. The decade-long, $10 billion deal with the NFL to show 15 games a year rightly has garnered attention even as the league renewed (at double the price) deals with long-time partners among legacy broadcast and cable networks. 

The NFL deal won't take effect until 2023, but gives Amazon exclusive access to what has been one of the most popular shows on traditional TV, Thursday Night Football. Amazon executives are also trying to figure out how to put the company's stamp on those broadcasts, now that it's not merely retransmitting something produced by Fox or another broadcaster. 

It's not hard to imagine a much tighter nexus between game cast and online commerce. There's even the potential to connect to a younger audience by pairing up at least one version of telecasts featuring, say, star Twitch personalities who may also be very good at the Madden NFL football video game. 

Amazon Prime Video also will show 21 Yankees baseball games this season in the New York region, one of the benefits of its investment in the YES regional sports network alongside the Yankees and Sinclair Broadcasting. Other live sports will include more Premier League soccer matches in England, plus tennis and swimming championships. It's not ESPN, but gives subscribers more reason to stick around. 

And that's exactly the point, as Dave Fildes, Amazon's head of investor relations, said during the earnings call. 

"We look at Prime Video as a component of the broader Prime membership and making sure it's driving adoption and retention as it is," Fildes said. "It's a significant acquisition channel in Prime countries. And that we look at it and see that members who watch video have higher free-trial conversion rates, higher renewal rates, higher overall engagement."

Prime Video also may be one of Amazon's secret weapons as it extends Prime around the world, Fildes said. Prime Video was offered in Brazil as a stand-alone service, and then helped recruit customers into the parent offering. 

"...That was, as an example, a great way to expose people to Amazon," Fildes said. "And as we launched the broader Prime in Brazil, it was a great mechanism to (bring) folks into that program."

That Prime Video, an undersung part of the Prime team of services, could ultimately become, in sports parlance, a two-way player capable of both attracting new customers for the parent offering and keeping others around, has to be more than a bit discomfiting for all the traditional studios and their subscription services. None of them has anything like what Amazon also has to offer. Indeed, some of them rely on its AWS cloud services to reach their customers, and generate substantial subscription revenues through Amazon Prime Video's add-on Channels program. 

The numbers this week, in awards, subscriber households, and viewership all suggest, however, that Amazon Prime Video is now ready to be taken seriously for what it is: one of the biggest, strongest, and most strategically positioned, services in the business. Everyone else can figure out how to work with them. Or they better hope Congress gets hopping on those antitrust breakup bills. 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is stepping as CEO in the third quarter and will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who serves as chief executive of the company’s cloud technology division, AWS.

Bezos will assume the role of executive chairman. 

The announcement was made Tuesday during Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings call. 

“Right now I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition,” Bezos said in a statement.

Bezos had stepped away from day-to-day operations, but has been recently re-engaged, with pandemic-era consumption expanding Amazon's ship-to-doorstep business to previously unimagined profitability. 

On Tuesday, the company reported that net sales for 2020  increased 38% to $386.1 billion, with net income nearly doubling for the year to $21.3 billion. 

In December, Bloomberg pegged Bezos's personal net worth at $182 billion. 

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 shortly after Bezos founded the company as an online seller of books. He founded Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2003 with a team of 57 staffers, ultimately building it into the world's biggest provider of cloud-based computing services.

Generating between $100 million and $106 million in the fourth quarter alone, AWS's revenue could soon surpass the company it serves as a subsidiary.  

While conceding he's unfamiliar with the finer details, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos predicts his company will eventually come to terms with AT&T and WarnerMedia and offer app support for the new HBO Max service. 

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) used the House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on Big Tech to try and get a handle, on behalf of consumers he said, on when the HBO Max app would be available on Amazon's Fire TV.

He asked Bezos about his role as a gatekeeper. He said he understood negotiations were ongoing, but that Amazon was asking not just for money but content from HBO sibling Warner Media.

He asked if it was fair for Amazon to use its gatekeeper status in the streaming device market to promote its position as a competitor in the video streaming market.

Also read: HBO Now Support on Amazon Fire TV Set to Expire Friday

Bezos said he was not familiar with the details of the negotiation but predicted they would come to an agreement and suggested it was a case of two large companies doing what large companies do when negotiating.

Raskin said the issue extended to smaller companies in a less advantageous position with respect to negotiating with Amazon. He asked Bezos to speak to the general proposition of whether it was OK, company size notwithstanding, to negotiate not just for financial terms to be part of Fire, but also to extract leverage in getting content with them.

Bezos said that, in general, when companies are negotiating they aren't just talking about the money that will change hands but what they are getting in exchange for the amount of money. He called that fundamental business.

The HBO Max app currently isn't support by the two biggest connected TV device platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. In fact, Amazon's deal to support WarnerMedia's legacy HBO Now app expires. 

Raskin said that, from the outside, it could look like a structural conflict of interest, using control over access to obtain leverage over creative content they want.

Bezos said he could imagine scenarios where it would be inappropriate and ones where it would not be, and that he would get back to the congressman.

Raskin said the committee was trying to make sure that the money and power amassed by the "cyber barons" of this century is not used against Democracy and human rights abroad or the interests of a free market at home.

Amazon has hired former Sony TV and Hulu executive Mike Hopkins to oversee Amazon Studios and Amazon Prime Video, reporting directly to company CEO Jeff Bezos.

Hopkins, who is departing a leading role at Sony Pictures TV that he occupied since late 2017, will replace Jeffrey Blackburn, Amazon’s senior VP of business development and digital entertainment, who is going on sabbatical.

Jen Salke, who currently heads Amazon Studios, will report to Hopkins, as she did Blackburn.

“Mike comes to us with over 20 years of industry experience at Fox, Hulu, and Sony,” Blackburn said in an email to his Amazon staff, obtained the Los Angeles Times. “He has an extensive track record as a global business leader in media, film and TV — negotiating landmark content and distribution agreements, running marketing operations, leading product/tech teams, and overseeing production of breakthrough television content.”

Tony Vinciquerra, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, sent a note to staff Monday morning, thanking Hopkins for his work at the studio. “From day one he was charged with rethinking the way we run our television businesses,” the memo said “Under his watch, SPT has been transformed into a stronger and more nimble organization, able to pivot and change course quickly in today’s rapidly evolving entertainment landscape.”

It’s expected that Salke will continue to make inroads into the Hollywood production business through Amazon Studios’s Culver City, Calif. headquarters. It’s also expected that Blackburn will return to work at the company, but in a different capacity. 

Amazon has hired former Sony TV and Hulu executive Mike Hopkins to oversee Amazon Studios and Amazon Prime Video, reporting directly to company CEO Jeff Bezos. 

Hopkins, who is departing a leading role at Sony Pictures TV that he occupied since late 2017, will replace Jeffrey Blackburn, Amazon’s senior VP of business development and digital entertainment, who is going on sabbatical. 

Jen Salke, who currently heads Amazon Studios, will report to Hopkins, as she did Blackburn. 

“Mike comes to us with over 20 years of industry experience at Fox, Hulu, and Sony,” Blackburn said in an email to his Amazon staff, obtained the Los Angeles Times. “He has an extensive track record as a global business leader in media, film and TV — negotiating landmark content and distribution agreements, running marketing operations, leading product/tech teams, and overseeing production of breakthrough television content.”

Tony Vinciquerra, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, sent a note to staff Monday morning, thanking Hopkins for his work at the studio. “From day one he was charged with rethinking the way we run our television businesses,” the memo said “Under his watch, SPT has been transformed into a stronger and more nimble organization, able to pivot and change course quickly in today’s rapidly evolving entertainment landscape.”

It’s expected that Salke will continue to make inroads into the Hollywood production business through Amazon Studios’s Culver City, Calif. headquarters. It’s also expected that Blackburn will return to work at the company, but in a different capacity. 

Mediacom Communications founder, chairman and CEO Rocco Commisso joined an elite club Tuesday, becoming one of 22 new entrants to the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans.

Commisso, who founded Mediacom in 1995, placed a very respectable No. 150 overall on the list, which was again peppered with internet billionaires and media moguls. Microsoft founder Bill Gates was No. 1 on the list for the 24th consecutive year, with a total net worth of $89 billion, up $8 billion from the prior year. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos was No. 2, worth $81.5 billion.

Commisso, estimated to be worth $4.5 billion, is the lone cable operator in Forbes's new class of entrepreneurs. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (No. 359, $2.2 billion) was also among the new entrants.

But the overall list had more than its share of media chieftains of much larger companies, like Dish Network chairman and CEO Charlie Ergen (No. 30, $15.8 billion); 21st Century Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch (No. 39, $12 billion); Liberty Media's John Malone (No. 56, $8.2 billion); Viacom executive chairman Summer Redstone (No. 115, $5.1 billion) and Cablevision founder Charles Dolan (No. 118, $5 billion).

RELATED:Mediacom: 20 Years of Growth | Rocco Commisso: From Calabria to a Cable Chairmanship | Standing Up for Small Cable’s Interests | Mediacom: What They’re Saying | Viewpoint: Timing Was Right for Rocco

Commisso has grown Mediacom from a single cable system in California to the fifth largest operator in the country, with more than 800,000 video subscribers. He has supported several educational causes, and has been a generous backer of his alma mater Columbia University, which named its soccer field after him in 2013. In January, Commisso purchased the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, and has been an avid fan and supporter of U.S. soccer. He was part of the anti-trust suit filed against U.S. soccer’s governing body, the United States Soccer Federation – last month.

But according to the Forbes article, Commisso's mind continues to be focused on Mediacom.

"All the guys that are on the Forbes 400, we're married to our businesses,” Commisso told the magazine.

Vessel, a YouTube competitor that is using a subscription option to provide temporary early access to some of its OTT fare, has raised a $57.5 million “B” round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with help from earlier investors Greylock, Benchmark and Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’s personal investment company.

Vessel, a service co-founded by former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, has raised more than $134 million.

Following a brief invitation-only beta trial, Vessel’s service launched commercially on March 24. It’s offered on Web browsers and iOS devices, with an Android version in the works.

As detailed by Vessel in December, the service's “early access” subscription product provides temporary exclusives to short-form videos for $2.99 per month.  After that limited exclusivity window, typically 72 hours, Vessel’s content partners are free to make their videos available via YouTube, their own Web sites, or any other online distributor.

Vessel, which struck a deal earlier this month to offer clips from The Ellen DeGeneres Show,  also offers a slate of free, ad-supported, non-exclusive videos. Vessel has not announced how many consumers are on its subscription-based offering.  

IVP, a later stage VC and growth equity firm with more than $4 billion in committed capital, has made bets on companies such as Netflix, Shazam, Snapchat, Twitter, LegalZoom and Dropbox.

“We believe Vessel has the potential to be as successful as these companies someday,” IVP general partner Todd Chaffee wrote in this blog post.

“What we are trying to accomplish —creating a video platform that delights consumers and creators alike— is ambitious,” Kilar wrote in this blog post. “Each of these investors brings experience, resources and long-term thinking that will guide us as we continue pursuing our ambitions. Their investment in Vessel will enable us to grow, as a company and a business, equipped with the world-class team and resources we need to make our visions real.”