Amazon opening media development centre in London

Amazon will combine the development teams of two UK media companies it acquired last year to create a new Digital Media Development Centre in London.

The internet giant said it will merge the design and development teams of both companies in an eight-floor, 47,000 square foot centre in London to work on the creation of interactive digital services for TVs, game consoles, smartphones and PCs. The engineers will also work to improve the experience on Amazon's websites, the company added.

Although it declined to give a breakdown on the exact number of staff to be based at the new site, Amazon said that there will be "hundreds of employees" based at the centre.

"Our focus at this time is on getting the existing team into the building, but we are a growing company and we may well look to recruit in the future," a spokesperson for the company said.

In February last year, Amazon bought Lovefilm, a European film subscription service with over two million members in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. By July 2011, Amazon had also acquired Pushbutton, a company that designs and build user interfaces to enable viewers to select and watch media content across a range of different devices and platforms.

Lovefilm was one of Pushbutton's clients and together they worked on a variety of digital innovations, including Lovefilm Instant, which offers members unlimited streaming of movies and TV series from £4.99 per month on over 280 internet-enabled devices including PCs, PlayStations, the iPad and the Xbox 360, Amazon said.

London has been pushing to become "Britain's answer to Silicon Valley" since November 2010 by promoting east London as a Tech City. The number of digital companies that have set up in east London's Tech City has grown from 226 to 600 over the past three years.

Anh Nguyen contributed to this story