Open source software companies like MongoDB are making drastic moves to protect their intellectual property from cloud giants like Amazon or Alibaba — but a clash between MongoDB and $31 billion software giant Red Hat highlights the potential pitfalls of that strategy.

Fedora, a Red Hat-sponsored open source operating system, has dropped support for the very popular MongoDB database. Although Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, and has project leaders who work at Red Hat, it's technically a separately-run open source project. Fedora cited concerns over the company's controversial new licensing agreement, and indeed, Fedora has tacked MongoDB's SSPL onto its "bad license" list.

This comes months after Red Hat, which is on the cusp of being acquired by IBM, removed MongoDB support from its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS in November.

Late last year, MongoDB announced the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. Under the terms of the SSPL, any cloud provider who wants to take the free MongoDB database and package it up as service for their own customers has to also release their code as open source, free for anybody to see and use...or else pay MongoDB for a license. It's intended to make it harder for cloud providers to make money from MongoDB without paying up.

The problem, in Red Hat's view, is that the SSPL violates a core principle of open source, which states that anybody should be able to use this free software any way that they want to, without restrictions, even if they're using it to turn a profit — a line of thinking that echoes many critics of MongoDB's SSPL and licenses like it.

"It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users," Tom Callaway, a technical and community outreach program manager at Red Hat, wrote in a blog post. "Additionally, it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt towards commercial users of software under that license."

For its part, MongoDB has disputed the characterization that the SSPL disqualifies the platform as open source. Indeed, MongoDB has submitted a redrafted second version of the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative, an industry body, to win the right to call it an open source license.

Read more:Two software companies, fed up with Amazon, Alibaba and other big cloud players, have a controversial new plan to fight back

"We continue to work with the OSI as they deliberate on the SSPL and we still strongly believe that the SSPL meets the tenets of open source," Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, said in a statement.

However, Red Hat itself isn't so bullish about MongoDB's chances, here. Richard Fontana, senior commercial counsel at Red Hat and himself a member of the OSI board, calls SSPL the "most controversial license the OSI has received in years," and admonished MongoDB for breaking from the open source community.

"Here's a major community project that looks carefully at the license and says, 'look it doesn't need community standards on what a free software license is,'" Fontana said. "It's a strong statement and that may have an impact on the debate as it goes forward."

Bradley M. Kuhn, the president of the Software Freedom Conservancy, says that he consulted with Red Hat on this situation, and isn't surprised that the company is moving away from MongoDB.

"MongoDB released this license with no discussion with the community. This frustrated all of us, and I sense that frustration with Red Hat as well," says Kuhn.

'A burdensome requirement'

Beyond Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is looking at other places where it might have to take action over MongoDB's move towards the SSPL, says Fontana.

The general feeling at Red Hat, says Fontana, is that the SSPL adds a potential legal headache for customers and users of its products. There's no precedent for something like the SSPL, and that could make problems for any company who wanted to ensure they were in full legal compliance while using MongoDB, he says.

"Our customers really appreciate the fact that we are very careful about the licenses that we say are open source products. They look to us for guidance. If they found this unusual license with an unprecedented restriction, I think some customers might be legitimately concerned," says Fontana.

Read more: Startups are taking on Amazon's cloud with a controversial new plan, but experts warn it could undermine the foundations of open source

More than anything, SSPL essentially requires users that are offering MongoDB's database server as a service to make much of their own, potentially proprietary code, available for free. Fontana says this goes far beyond what any other free software license requires.

"That's actually such a burdensome requirement that I would say it's impossible to comply with," Fontana said.

Moving forward with the license

While MongoDB awaits a verdict on the second version of the SSPL, it's still using the first. Other companies, like Confluent and Redis Labs have also made similar license changes, for similar ends, though they haven't submitted them to the OSI.

Ultimately, the SSPL didn't stop Amazon Web Services from creating its own MongoDB-compatible database service called DocumentDB, though MongoDB has said that the two aren't directly competitive. Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB MongoDB

While Fontana gives MongoDB credit for going through the approval process, and calls MongoDB's issues with cloud providers "a legitimate concern," he believes MongoDB should not have started using SSPL before it was vetted by the open source community.

"I would encourage MongoDB to go back to using an accepted and approved license for an open source license. They should wait for OSI to make a decision about SSPL," Fontana said. "That would be a preferable way to proceed."

If you follow Tesla and the company's endless flurry of news, non-news, rumor, innuendo, and Twitterific chatter, you might think that the entire auto industry is furiously chasing a relatively tiny upstart California company that will do well to have sold 250,000 vehicles last year.

Such is Tesla's reality-distortion field. You can't really blame it on CEO Elon Musk; Tesla's fans are, as a group, given to dramatic overstatement.

Read more: Cadillac revealed a futuristic electric SUV concept that will rival Tesla's Model X — and it looks awesome

I just got back from the Detroit Auto Show, and in my conversations with various auto executives, the word "Tesla" came up not once. Tesla wasn't at the event, but that's because Tesla doesn't really do car shows. Why bother? It's selling only three vehicles. Nearly 50% of what it could put on display — a new Roadster sports car, a Semi truck, and a pickup — are still in the preproduction or concept stages.

No time to worry about Tesla

Cadillac's new electric-vehicle platform. Cadillac

Overall, the auto industry is doing fine without worrying about what Tesla is up to, and it has plenty of bigger problems to contend with.

Sales in the US again came in at near-record levels in 2018, and the most popular vehicles among consumers — SUVs and pickup trucks — are also the most profitable.

But General Motors is continuing to manage its business aggressively, idling underperforming factories and expanding its investment in autonomous and electric mobility. Ford is engaged in a deep restructuring. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is dealing with an unexpected leadership transition after the sudden death last year of CEO Sergio Marchionne. And Nissan's former chairman, the onetime industry legend Carlos Ghosn, continues to reside in a Tokyo jail on charges of financial impropriety.

Outsize belief in Tesla's influence isn't yet a serious affliction. But it's getting worse, and at some point it will be serious. The truth is that there isn't much that Tesla is doing that the traditional industry needs or wants to copy. So far, the biggest shift possibly inspired by Tesla was GM's and Ford's decision to report quarterly rather than monthly US sales data — essentially an accounting tweak.

Electric cars are easier than you think

GM unveiled the Chevy Bolt and got it to market in 2016 in about a year. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Electric vehicles aren't that complicated from an engineering standpoint. GM proved rather decisively that it could design, build, and launch a long-range mass-market EV, the Chevy Bolt, in about a year. The car has been on sale since late 2016. EVs are a battery and motor, maybe two.

Tesla's software and infotainment systems capture a lot of attention, but those aren't core elements of an automobile. Tesla obviously learned this in 2018, as it struggled mightily with the basics of modern mass production, something other automakers perfected in the 1980s.

Detroit has been doing a good job of pitching an electrified future. Two of the biggest news stories to come out of the Detroit Auto Show were GM's decision to make Cadillac its lead electric brand and Ford's announcement that it's developing an all-electric version of its top-selling F-150 pickup truck.

What Tesla boosters seem to miss is that electrification is trivially easy for big car companies. It's hard for Tesla because the company is just 15 years old and has been building its own vehicles in serious volumes for only about three years. The learning curve is quite steep in the type of complicated supply-chain-and-capital-intensive manufacturing that gives consumers many millions of new and widely varied vehicles each year to choose from.

Tesla's strength, like Apple's, is the refinement of existing ideas. Over a decade ago, Tesla developed a better battery. The company has pioneered over-the-air software updates for its cars, set a standard for luxury EV design and performance, and proved that substantial EV sales are aided by developing a widespread network of fast-charging stations.

Make no mistake: Tesla is a great company

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Patrick Fallon / Reuters

Of these, the one that the traditional industry has latched onto is the charging piece. But otherwise, Tesla isn't causing anyone in the world's automaking capitals to lose sleep. They have President Donald Trump for that, not to mention numerous factors beyond their control, such as gas prices, credit conditions, exchange rates, and unpredictable geopolitics.

If Tesla did eventually cause auto executives to toss and turn, then those execs would simply ... make some more electric cars. This is, after all, what they do and have been doing for over a century: making cars.

They aren't even all that enthusiastic about competing with Tesla, despite what various short-sellers might believe. Competition costs money. Sure, Ford and Chevy compete for pickup-truck buyers. But they also each sell a staggering number of moneymaking pickups each year, and they can expect to keep doing that, year after year. They have a pretty good sense of what that game is all about.

Meanwhile, overdoing it on what could be too many low-profit, low-sales EVs would be throwing money away. On the environmental side, it would be far better for the planet if the traditional industry sold hybrid gas-electric versions of all the vehicles it manufactures. But unfortunately, if Tesla has had one striking influence, it's been to undermine the once robust hybrid market and push those customers toward far more expensive all-electric vehicles.

Make no mistake: Tesla is a great company. It makes great cars. It has done something nobody in the industry thought was possible by creating a vibrant all-electric brand. But is it exerting a radical influence on the car business? Hardly.

On Sunday, January 20, the Earth will pass between the sun and moon, block light from the sun and casting a shadow on the moon.

This is a total lunar eclipse, and it will be the last one we see until May 2021 (though there will be partial lunar eclipses before then).

Total lunar eclipses are not that rare — the last one occurred in July 2018— but this one stands out as a "super blood wolf moon."

That name is based on the eclipse's timing and the moon's position relative to Earth. Total lunar eclipses make the moon look orange-red because of the effect that Earth's atmosphere has on the sunlight that passes through it, which is why they are often called blood moons. Full moons that occur in in January are known as "wolf moons" (each month gets its own full-moon name), and this one will appear especially bright and big because the moon will be a little closer to Earth than normal — hence the label "super."

The total lunar eclipse will be fully visible to people in North America, South America, Greenland, Iceland, western Europe, and Africa. People in other parts of the world will see a partial eclipse.

According to NASA, the total lunar eclipse will last one hour and two minutes. For those on the US East Coast, the total eclipse will begin around 11:41 p.m. local time with a peak at 12:16 a.m.

During a lunar eclipse, the moon first touches Earth's outer shadow, called a penumbra, then moves into the full shadow, called the umbra. It then goes back into the penumbra.

A diagram of the Earth, moon, and sun during a total lunar eclipse or "blood moon." Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

About 80% of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen gas, and the rest is mostly oxygen. After our atmosphere takes in white sunlight, that gas mixture scatters around blue and purple colors, which is why the sky appears blue to our eyes during the day.

During a lunar eclipse, Earth's atmosphere scatters blue light and refracts the red — a process similar to what we see during sunrise and sunset. That's why the moon appears to turn red when in Earth's umbra.

Watching a total lunar eclipse is not dangerous — unlike looking at a solar eclipse without protection— so you don't need any special glasses.

Would a notification from your doctor as soon as you forget to take your medication help keep you on track?

A digital medicine company called Proteus is betting the answer is yes.

The Silicon Valley-based company makes what have been called "smart pills": essentially, versions of regular medications embedded with a tiny sensor that can be tracked by a patch worn on a patient's stomach.

Since debuting the first medication made with the technology — a form of the depression and schizophrenia drug Abilify— in 2017, the company has put its hardware into 40 different medications ranging from drugs for infectious disease and mental illness to diabetes. Valued at $1.5 billion, Proteus has raised $487 million with backing from big name investors like Novartis.

And now, the company is expanding into cancer.

On Thursday, Proteus announced the launch of the first clinical trial of its technology in oncology. As part of the trial, seven patients with advanced colorectal cancer are now taking a sensor-embedded version of the common chemotherapy drug capecitabine in place of their regular medicine. The company hopes to enroll as many as 750 patients in the trial — which is taking place in partnership with the nonprofit Minneapolis-based health system Fairview Health Services and the University of Minnesota — within the next two years.

The goal is to determine if "smart pills" are truly smart: that is, if they help patients take their medications when they should. That's an important goal for conditions like depression, schizophrenia, and cancer, where patients often struggle to take medications. Timing those medications and ensuring that patients always take the correct dose is a key part of treatment.

"In cancer, the difference between too much of a medication and too little of a medication is very narrow," Edward Greeno, a practicing oncologist who is overseeing the trial and is the director of the University of Minnesota Health's oncology service line, told Business Insider.

Pills that tell your doctor when you've taken them — and how much exercise you're getting

Proteus' digital pills work by way of a tiny sensor roughly the size of a period. Courtesy Proteus Digital Health Proteus' digital pills work by way of a tiny sensor roughly the size of a period. The sensor can either be stamped into a pill or included alongside a traditional medication and then encased in a translucent shell that breaks down when a patient swallows it. Then, patients attach a credit card-sized adhesive sensor anywhere on their stomach. The sensor tracks when the pill is ingested.

The company was founded in 2001 and got approval from the Food and Drug Administration for its technology in 2012. So far, the company said there have been 177,000 ingestions of Proteus sensors in various medications ranging from drugs for tuberculosis to those for HIV.

A version of the Proteus system where a traditional medication is included alongside the sensor in a clear casing. Courtesy Proteus Digital Health

In addition to alerting clinicians as to when patients take their medications, Proteus' digital pills also keep track of patients' activity levels — telling them where and how often they move around.

That could be a tough pill to swallow for patients who don't like the idea of being monitored remotely, but Greeno said the patients he's working with currently actually feel better having a physician involved in this way.

Greeno said he's observed some other surprising things, too, like seeing how little activity some of his patients get. That's already motivating him to think about ways to better incorporate exercise into treatment.

"It's a nice surprise to start thinking about things we hadn't thought about before," Greeno said.

Should all your medications be digital?

Proteus' cancer trial is ambitious. Although only seven patients have been enrolled so far, the company aims to have 750 sign up within the next two years. Fairview Health System is covering the cost of the treatment.

Beyond making a digital version of the chemotherapy drug capecitabine, Proteus aims to eventually digitize all of the medications a cancer patient is taking, George Savage, Proteus' cofounder and chief medical officer, told Business Insider. Those would include everything from anti-nausea drugs to pain medications like opioids.

All of that rests on the idea that digital pills offer a significant benefit over regular ones. However, the scientific evidence of this remains somewhat unclear.

A Proteus-sponsored study of roughly 100 patients with hypertension and type 2 diabetes suggested that its digital pills might be an improvement on regular pills, but the results were somewhat mixed. Researchers behind the study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2017, concluded that patients using Proteus' digital pills had slightly better measures of blood pressure, but rates of medication adherence — or whether or not patients took their pills when they were supposed to — was not measured as part of the study.

Several other researchers have attempted to study whether other means of reminding patients to take their medications could help, but they've also come up with subpar results.

Scientists behind a clinical trial of roughly 50,000 patients published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2017 concluded that none of three devices designed to remind patients to take their pills significantly improved medication adherence rates. The reminders included an elaborate toggle system that people engaged each time they took a pill; a bottle cap with a digital timer; and a pill container with distinct compartments for the days of the week.

It remains to be seen whether Proteus' digital cancer pills will help patients take their medications when they should. Results from their clinical trial are expected by 2021.

Lyft has been quickly scaling up its engineering team as it continues to expand into things like bikes, scooters, and more.

To keep up with the growth and manage its team of engineers that is now more than 1,000-strong, the ride-hailing company has poached Eisar Lipkovitz, Google's former vice president of engineering, the company announced Friday.

"It's clear that Lyft is tackling one of the most interesting and world-changing engineering challenges of our lifetime, and the team has done an exceptional job innovating through dispatch, matching, pricing, and mapping to create the overall experience," Lipkovitz said in a statement provided by Lyft.

"The work Lyft is doing intersects with my passion of operating extremely complex systems efficiently while developing strong leaders in tech, and I couldn't be more excited to join the team."

Read more:2 dealmakers named David: Uber and Lyft's expected IPOs will trigger competition at Google's in-house VC firms

And he's far from the first Googler to move to Lyft, the latest in a long-running drain of talent from the search giant that's owned by Alphabet. A cursory LinkedIn search shows nearly 300 current Lyft employees formerly worked for Google, including other engineering manager Tom Lewkowitz, director of sustainability Sam Arons, and CTO Chris Lambert.

Notably, Alphabet has also invested in two of Lyft's late-stage funding rounds, as Business Insider's Becky Peterson notes. CapitalG, formerly known as Google Capital, led the company's Series H funding round last year, when the company raised $1.7 billion at a $10 billion valuation. David Lawee, who led that investment, plays an active role on Lyft's board.

Lyft in December said it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering, or IPO. After doubling its engineering team in 2018, according to a spokesperson, investors will likely see Lipkovitz's taking of the helm as another signal the company is primed for more growth going forward.

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Wall Street analysts on Friday were heaping praise onto Netflix following the streaming giant's quarterly earnings report, raising their price targets and recommending investors buy up the name. They cited strong content slates and solid subscriber-growth momentum.

One of the most negative firms on the name even bumped up its target, though it said the company's cash burn was still a massive concern.

Netflix reported quarterly earnings-per-share estimates on Thursday that exceeded analysts' expectations, but it fell slightly short of revenue expectations. The company reiterated its expectation for its 2019 cash burn to be similar to that of 2018, implying negative free cash flow of about $3 billion despite its roughly $1.5 billion in incremental revenue that should result from the price hike it announced earlier this week.

Now read: 'Take off the blindfold': Here's what Wall Street is saying about Netflix earnings

Michael Pachter and his team at Wedbush wrote that they expected Netflix's content spending to "trigger substantial cash burn for many years" and said future price hikes could cause a slowdown in subscriber growth. They maintained their "underperform" rating and raised their 12-month price target to $165 a share from $150. Still, the higher number is more than 50% below where shares were trading Friday.

Their new target reflects the impact of Netflix's recently announced price increase and new subscriber-growth outlook. Pachter told Business Insider what he'd need to see from the company to view the streaming platform more positively.

"I'll reconsider my rating and price target if they reverse faster," he wrote in an email. "If they go from $(3) billion in 2018 to $(1) billion in 2019 and to $1 billion positive in 2020, I will give them credit for that."

Pachter said with $2 billion of annual free-cash-flow growth, Netflix would have to pay back $11 billion and finish that by 2023, with a $7 billion free-cash-flow rate.

"20x $7 billion = $140 billion, and I would only have to discount that back for four years," he wrote. "That would get me to a $256 price target, and I'd reconsider upgrading to Neutral then."

To be sure, this outlook is the exception, not the rule, on Wall Street. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg overwhelmingly rate the stock a "buy," with a price target of $395 a share on average — about 16% higher than where the stock was trading Friday.

Netflix was up 33% this year through Thursday. 

Read more about Netflix:

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Tesla is laying off 7% of its employees, CEO Elon Musk said on Friday in an email to employees, the second round of cuts the automaker has made in less than a year.

Tesla had expanded its workforce by 30% in 2018 as it ramped up production of its Model 3 sedan, Musk said, even as it laid off 9% of its employees in June. Musk suggested the most recent cuts were necessary as Tesla seeks to become consistently profitable while introducing lower-priced vehicles like the long-awaited $35,000 version of the Model 3.

Read more: Tesla's layoffs mean the company's lead on electric vehicles could be ending, one Wall Street analyst says

"We face an extremely difficult challenge: making our cars, batteries and solar products cost-competitive with fossil fuels. While we have made great progress, our products are still too expensive for most people," Musk said in the email, which was posted on Tesla's website.

Tesla has big expenses ahead

The layoffs were the right move for a company that has major expenses ahead as it prepares to build a new factory and introduce a range of new vehicles, said David Whiston, an automotive analyst at Morningstar, and Michael Ramsey, an automotive analyst at Gartner.

"They're still a young company, and they have a lot of growing pains," Whiston said. "Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to make adjustments and people lose their jobs."

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To finance the factory, which will be located in Shanghai, and upcoming vehicles like a semi-truck, pickup truck, and a new version of its Roadster sports car, Tesla needs to make profits, raise money from Wall Street, or use a combination of the two. If Tesla relies at all on debt, it will have to show Wall Street it is making an effort to control its expenses, Ramsey said.

"I think that this shows that finally, the company or Elon … recognizes that they cannot continue burning cash at the rate that they had been, or the money faucet will turn off."

Elon Musk expects a small profit in Q1

Tesla surprised Wall Street analysts by posting a $312 million profit in the third quarter of 2018, just the third quarterly profit in the automaker's 16-year history. But the year preceding the quarter had been marked by widening losses as Tesla struggled to ramp up Model 3 production.

Musk said it appears the automaker will report a profit for the fourth quarter of 2018, and he predicted a "tiny" profit for the first quarter of this year that will depend in part on luck.

But the layoffs are not an act of desperation, Ramsey said, pointing out that General Motors announced in November that it would cut 15% of its salaried North American workforce despite later saying that it expects its 2018 profit to beat Wall Stree projections.

"I don't think it's desperation. I think it's something that had to happen," he said of the Tesla layoffs.

Microsoft will stop issuing security updates to smartphones running Windows 10 Mobile on December 10, 2019, and it officially recommends you switch to Android or iOS devices by that time.

The company updated its device operating system life cycle FAQ on January 14 with the new information, saying:

"The end of support date applies to all Windows 10 Mobile products, including Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise. Windows 10 Mobile users will no longer be eligible to receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free assisted support options or online technical content updates from Microsoft for free."

Under the "What should Windows 10 Mobile customers do now?" section of the FAQ, Microsoft now recommends "that customers move to a supported Android or iOS device."

Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer displays a Nokia Lumia 920 featuring Windows Phone 8 during an event in San Francisco, California October 29, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Windows 10 Mobile users stopped getting new features and non-security related updates in October 2017 with version 1709. The company kept issuing security updates for those staunch Windows 10 Mobile users for over a year, but the time has finally come even for the Windows 10 Mobile enthusiast to make the switch.

Without security updates, Windows 10 Mobile users who continue to use Windows mobile devices will put themselves at a higher risk to security threats, whether it be a hack or a malware attack that can leave your sensitive and personal information exposed.

For Windows 10 Mobile users now looking to make the switch to Android or iOS devices, we'd recommend the OnePlus 6T, Samsung Galaxy S9, or Google Pixel 3 for Android phones. As for iPhones, you have your pick of the litter between the iPhone 7, iPhone 8, iPhone XR, and iPhone XS.

Amazon's Prime membership program continues to reach a larger percentage of the US population.

More than 100 million people have access to Amazon Prime benefits as of December 31, according to a Consumer Intelligence Research Partners survey of 500 Amazon customers. That translates to 62% of Amazon customers getting access to perks like free two-day shipping, Prime Video streaming, and more.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the survey.

Outside of major milestones, Amazon does not typically share Prime subscriber numbers. The last such milestone was in April 2018, when Bezos said in his yearly investor letter that Amazon had more than 100 million paying subscribers globally as of 2017.

Read more: Jeff Bezos finally revealed how many people pay for Amazon Prime

CIRP did not make a distinction between paying subscribers and those who access their service through a housemate's account or a free trial.

CIRP also said Prime membership grew 10% in the last year, which was "slower than before, but still significant on a huge base and after years of rapid growth," Josh Lowitz, partner and co-founder of CIRP, said in a statement.

The slower growth combines with the membership's nature changing, as the survey found that the annual membership has become a less dominant option.

"As Prime membership growth flattens, the nature of the membership changes somewhat," Mike Levin, partner and co-founder of CIRP, said in a statement. "One-third of members pay a monthly fee, and can basically leave and rejoin Prime at any time. They do this even though the annual cost of $119 costs less than the sum of twelve monthly payments on the monthly plan, or $156."

Levin said there is concern that these members who dip in and out of their Prime benefits won't add as much value to Amazon's bottom line.

Read more: Prime members spend way more on Amazon than other customers — and the difference is growing

"These more transient members obviously don't have the same commitment to Amazon shopping and the suite of Prime member services," he said. "Presumably, they don't typically use the breadth of benefits to the same extent as annual members."

While Prime members buy an average of $1,400 in products from the website each year, regular, non-Prime customers only spend $600. That's a wider gulf than was reported by CIRP in 2017, when Prime customers spent an average of $1,300 and other customers spent $700.

Prime is increasingly a jewel in Amazon's crown, and the company takes great pains to ensure that its members perceive the service as a good value by frequently adding more features.

In fact, analysis by JPMorgan pegged the value of Prime at $785 a year when all benefits are combined — nearly 6.5 times the actual cost of a yearly Prime subscription ($119).

"Prime delivers such massive scale and features that we believe it would be very difficult for any company to replicate and compete against, and Amazon continues to expand and add more value to Prime by adding new benefits and growing existing offerings," the analysts wrote.

As more and more streaming services crop up, Netflix said it's not concerned with comparing itself to the competition. Instead, Netflix is more worried about keeping members watching instead of choosing another type of entertainment entirely — such as video games.

In its fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Netflix said it accounts for roughly 10% of all television screen time, with viewers streaming 100 million hours of content per day. By the close of 2018, the company had 139 million subscribers and had raised revenue by 35%, but still fell short of their earnings expectations for the fourth quarter. And in an increasingly diverse entertainment landscape, Netflix is now facing stiff competition from the likes of "Fortnite."

"We earn consumer screen time, both mobile and television, away from a very broad set of competitors," the quarterly earnings statement read. "We compete with (and lose to) 'Fortnite' more than HBO."

Read more: Netflix falls after slight Q4 revenue miss and solid subscriber-growth numbers

"Fortnite," the world's most popular video game, has had 200 million registered players since launching in June 2017, and generated more than $2.4 billion in revenue as a free-to-play game last year. News outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Axios have noted that "Fortnite" has become akin to a social network for young gamers, with the average player spending six to 10 hours a week online.

While Netflix may not be able to match the interactive allure of video games, the company plans to continue improving the user experience so that existing members are happy to carve out more time in their day.

"Our growth is based on how good our experience is, compared to all the other screen time experiences from which consumers choose," the earnings report reads. "Our focus is not on Disney+, Amazon or others, but on how we can improve our experience for our members."

Those improvements will come at a cost though, as the company recently announced that the subscription price will be increased by up to 18%.

Netflix has made comments in the past regarding competition and its drive to capture more time from viewers. During a 2017 earnings call, CEO Reed Hastings said one of Netflix's biggest competitors is sleep.

"You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night," Hastings said on the call. "We're competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it's a very large pool of time."

With multiple digital streaming services on the horizon, Netflix will still have to compete for content, but the battle for customer attention may be just as important.