Amazon.com is exploring the creation of a live online TV service and has been already in talks with major media companies including CBS and NBCUniversal, Bloomberg reports. A live service would expand the online retailer’s investment in video entertainment and bring it into competition with pay-TV providers like Comcast and AT&T. Other companies are offering or experimenting with Internet-delivered TV services, including Sony, Dish Network and Apple.

Amazon, declined to comment.

New cloud services for businesses

In the meantime, Amazon.com is expanding its core cloud business offerings with a new service designed to help companies analyze their data, as well as a product that will let them ship large amounts of data for storage on the cloud.

Amazon said its new analytics service, QuickSight, is fast and easy to use by non-technical staff who want to share analyzed data, either live or by screenshot.

Amazon QuickSight uses a Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (SPICE) to perform advanced calculations and render visualizations rapidly. Amazon QuickSight integrates automatically with AWS data services, enables organizations to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast query performance to them via SPICE’s query engine.

QuickSight is now available for preview, with a full launch in 2016.

For a standard edition, a customer will be charged $9 per month with a one-year commitment.

The service will compete with offerings from IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Tibco Software Inc.

Snowball, AWS' portable storage appliance, is designed to let companies shift huge amounts of data to the AWS cloud without having to spend a lot of time and bandwidth to transfer it over the Internet.

The 47-lb (21.3 kg) container, available to AWS customers immediately, can hold 50 terabytes of data, has 110 Volt power and a 10 GB network connection.

AWS Snowball appliances use multiple layers of security to protect customer data. In addition to tamper-resistant enclosures, AWS Snowball also employs end-to-end, 256-bit encryption, along with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

Customers will be charged $200 per job in addition to shipping charges, based on the destination and shipment method.

Users will have 10 days to upload their data and ship it, after which they will be charged $15 for each extra day.

In adition, Amazon Web Services and Accenture are formaing a business group to help their clients more quickly move their business to the cloud. The Accenture AWS Business Group brings together professionals from each company with expertise in cloud solutions architecture and development, marketing, sales, and business development. The business group will offer integrated consulting and technology solutions.

Accenture and AWS plan to invest significant resources over multiple years in the development of new services and technology solutions including application migration and development, cloud-based enterprise applications, and analytics and Big Data solutions. The companies are committed to train an additional 1,000 Accenture professionals and certify 500 Accenture professionals on the AWS Cloud in the first year, and support go-to-market activities.