Undaunted by the lackluster music sales, the company now has a new video gambit, the NYT reports:

In a significant step toward vanquishing the local video store and keeping couch potatoes planted firmly in front of their televisions and computers, Amazon.com will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service. That is different from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to endure lengthy waits as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

Yes, the story does seem a little breathless, and, yes, that last line is a little snippy—it really doesn’t take that long to download video from the iTunes Store.

Aside from the boring name—not to mention the inescapable feeling of “Jeez, another online media download service?”—the plan has one interesting feature:

It will also let users buy a TV show or movie without actually downloading the video file to the PC’s hard drive. Amazon will store each customer’s selection in what it calls “Your Video Library.” Customers can then watch that show or movie whenever they return to Amazon, even if it is from a different computer or device, a solution that neatly gets around studio concerns about piracy.

Couldn’t that turn into a killer app? I could see buying a season of a TV show and then powering though the episodes wherever I am—at home, the office, a friend’s house, or even on the subway, assuming the service would work with smart phones.

But the last line of that excerpt, the part about easing piracy worries, is problematic as well. As I read the story, the service is offering two options: Downloading the video onto your computer, and (or possibly or) keeping it on Amazon’s server. The fact that one of two options is less vulnerable to piracy doesn’t seem worth singling out for mention, does it?

It makes it sound like a potential pirate is going to say, “Hey, one of the two ways I can get my hands on a digital copy of this movie I want to pirate is more difficult that the other. Curses, foiled again!”

And what the story doesn’t say is that the old “Hey, we’ll keep your copy safe sound and sound on our little servers, don’t you worry about a thing” pitch could well turn into the newer “We’re sorry, we’re shutting down our service and the digital files you thought you owned are no longer accessible, but thank you for shopping with Amazon” switcheroo.