Amazon satellite network gets a rebrand — and drops its affordability pitch

[ad_1] Amazon’s budding satellite tv for pc web program is now not referred to as Mission Kuiper. It's now identified merely as “Leo.” The title change comes as the corporate seems to be shifting its focus from “unserved or underserved” communities to securing bigger industrial contracts.

The satellite tv for pc community has been within the works since 2019 and, as Amazon tells it, the title Mission Kuiper was solely ever imagined to be non permanent. Leo is a nod to the community’s location in what’s often called low-Earth orbit, generally referred to within the area business as “LEO.”

As Amazon labored towards launching the primary Kuiper satellites earlier this 12 months, the corporate boasted that the mission was an “initiative to extend international broadband entry” with a noble-sounding “mission to deliver quick, reasonably priced broadband” to communities that aren’t well-served by conventional web suppliers.

However, as TechCrunch beforehand famous, the corporate has modified the language it makes use of to explain the service in current months because it inked offers with Airbus and JetBlue, placing the community extra squarely in competitors with SpaceX’s Starlink service.

Amazon didn’t reply to requests for remark.

An archived model of the primary FAQ web page for Kuiper — revealed in late 2024 — places the aforementioned “mission” to serve these communities proper on the prime of the submit. Affordability is talked about thrice all through, with Amazon calling it a “key precept of Mission Kuiper.”

“Amazon has a longstanding dedication to low costs, and plenty of expertise constructing common, low-cost gadgets like Echo Dot and Fireplace TV Stick,” reads the reply to a query on the archived submit about how a lot Kuiper service will value. “We’re making use of an identical strategy with Mission Kuiper.”

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That question-and-answer about value is now gone from the Leo FAQ, and there's no point out of “affordability” wherever on the web page.

The language on the prime of the brand new FAQ can be totally different. It states that Leo is “Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite tv for pc community, designed to supply quick, dependable web to clients and communities past the attain of present networks.”

Whereas the Leo FAQ mentions that poor connectivity can “create an financial drawback for individuals, companies, and different organizations working in unserved and underserved components of the world,” the corporate is much less particular than it was about placing these communities entrance and heart within the buyer pipeline.

Amazon Leo’s new web site is much more blatant about how it's prioritizing house and industrial web service. It promotes the power to make “seamless video calls, stream 4K movies,” and “deal with your entire household’s web wants,” in addition to the truth that Leo is “[f]lexible, scalable, enterprise-ready.”

The concept of utilizing Leo “even in rural and distant places” is introduced up as virtually an afterthought on the primary web site, and there's no point out of value or affordability.

Regardless of all this, on Thursday, Amazon posted a flashy video concerning the title change on X. Amongst different issues, it reveals a child utilizing her pc to do homework, skilled drift racing, ambulance staff on a distant street, a farmer utilizing a pill, and a pair dancing in a laundromat. Together with the video, it wrote: “New title, identical mission.”