VIVI blasting the United States released the National Day holiday is not new to worry about

I speculated ahead of Amazon’s launch that the Kindle tablet should be called the Kindle 451, from the Bradbury book where the temperature of 451F is that which causes book paper to spontaneously ignite. I was wrong. Kindle Fire is the better name as the Fire will burn so varied a selection of physical media that no single named temperature could describe its impact.

This is the first true media tablet, as I predicted it would be. With the Kindle Fire, Amazon is making a play for movies, TV, music, magazines, apps, games as well as books.

The Kindle Fire is the first tablet that has its whole design optimized for content consumption. There’s no extraneous features. No camera. No aspirations to replace a notebook PC.

While Apple, Google and Microsoft aim to build tablets and smartphones that drive a post-PC world, Amazon is taking ownership of digital media. And, as digital media will become all media, by implication Amazon is now becoming the leading player in media as a whole. It’s impossible to assess the prospects for the Kindle devices without also assessing the potential for the total digital media market.

Yet despite the Kindle Fire’s impressive hardware the price is extremely aggressive at just $199, a fraction of the price of Apple’s iPad. Until the component breakdowns have been completed we can’t be sure… and I’m writing this minutes after the end of the launch event… But I strongly suspect that Amazon has only achieved that price due to its expectation of strong sales for Amazon’s content services, ie an effective content subsidy again as I predicted would happen.

The other Kindles that Amazon announced today follow that same grand strategy to dominate the new digital media market. The new Kindle range with cheap, very low power eInk touch screens range in price from just $79 to $149. While the Kindle Fire delivers the complete media experience with apps, games and movies, these traditional eReaders will make eBooks even more mass market.

The other area that Amazon’s new Kindle range has in common, is its use of cloud services, to support and enable the digital content store and consumption: eBooks sync across devices with Whispersync using each device’s Internet connection to enable it; movies and video stream to whatever device is most convenient and plays from where each movie was last watched.

However, it’s not going to be all plain sailing for Amazon at Apple and other tablet-makers expense. Much of the Kindle Fire’s feature set depends on Amazon digital services such as their cloud music play, streaming movies on demand etc which have not yet launched outside of the US.

If the Kindle Fire is primarily a US initiative for now, as the original Kindle was until just a year ago with the Kindle 3′s launch in Europe, then Apple and other tablet makers will make hay in Europe and Asia. More iOS devices now sell outside the US than within. If Apple lowers iPad forecasts in the US it will divert supply to Europe and Asia and be more aggressive in those markets instead.

By the time Amazon is ready to launch truly globally, they may be further behind than they are now. Making mobile devices is a global business with vast global economies of scale. Apple and Samsung know this, and Google/Motorola are acutely aware of this due to Motorola’s strongly US-centric sales bias.

Amazon has to speed up the roll out of its cloud and content services around the world if the Kindle Fire’s likely initial US success is to translate into a long term market victory.