Amazon shares are surging some 2 percent on Monday, and a global rollout of its streaming video service could mean further upside for the stock following weakness postelection.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Amazon is planning a massive expansion of Amazon Prime Video, which would bring more competition to video streaming offered by Netflix and will reportedly cost between $4 billion and $5 billion.
"It's absolutely expensive, but they addressed this in their earnings call, when they had their call last quarter, so I look at it and say, this is just another page out of the Netflix playbook, if you will," David Seaburg, head of sales trading at Cowen & Co., said Friday on CNBC's "Power Lunch."
Seaburg is bullish on the expanded streaming for Amazon, and sees it as a feature being used to go "head-to-head" against Netflix in more countries and gain market share, and he believes that "long term, they're going to benefit from this."
When it comes to the original content-streaming space, Seaburg said that there is "plenty of room for multiple players in that. It's not a zero-sum game."
And despite recent weakness on investors' postelection rotation out of large-cap tech names like Amazon and Facebook — Amazon fell over 6 percent in the two days following Election Day — Seaburg marks Amazon as a buy.
The prospect of Amazon investing further into media may be risky in the near term, according to Anthony DiClemente, media and internet research analyst at Instinet, an arm of Nomura.
"Like a lot of things that Amazon is doing in media now, this is a very expensive proposition," he said.
He noted investors tend to own Amazon not because of its add-on streaming business but for its hand in two markets: e-commerce and its cloud feature, Amazon Web Services.
"So people who own the stock need to be patient that this could, in the near term, impact margins the way margins were hurt in the third quarter," DiClemente said. Yet seasonally, he said, right now is a good time to own Amazon, as it tends to outperform in the fourth quarter.
DiClemente has a "buy" rating and a $950 price target on the now-$775 stock.
