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

Amazon’s budding satellite tv for pc web program is now not known as Venture Kuiper. It’s now identified merely as “Leo.” The identify 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 identify Venture Kuiper was solely ever purported to be momentary. Leo is a nod to the community’s location in what’s generally known as low-Earth orbit, generally referred to within the house trade as “LEO.”

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

However, as TechCrunch previously noted, the corporate has modified the language it makes use of to explain the service in latest 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 — printed in late 2024 — places the aforementioned “mission” to serve these communities proper on the prime of the submit. Affordability is talked about 3 times all through, with Amazon calling it a “key precept of Venture Kuiper.”

“Amazon has a longstanding dedication to low costs, and many expertise constructing standard, low-cost units like Echo Dot and Fireplace TV Stick,” reads the reply to a query on the archived submit about how a lot Kuiper service will price. “We’re making use of the same method with Venture Kuiper.”

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

The language on the prime of the brand new FAQ can also be totally different. It states that Leo is “Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite tv for pc community, designed to offer 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 website is much more blatant about how it’s prioritizing residence and industrial web service. It promotes the flexibility to make “seamless video calls, stream 4K movies,” and “deal with your complete household’s web wants,” in addition to the truth that Leo is “[f]lexible, scalable, enterprise-ready.”

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

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