Imagine if you could order something online and get it delivered in just 30 minutes,
kind of like a pizza except it's not a pizza.
That's what Amazon wants to do with its new shipping service called Prime Air.
The retailer plans to pull it off with the help of drones, believe it or not.
Ralitsa Vassileva explains.
Delivery to your doorstep by pilotless drone.
It's not science fiction, says Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos,
who unveiled the new delivery service it's testing Sunday on America's top-rated news program, CBS's 60 Minutes.
We can do half-hour delivery.
Half-hour delivery...
Half-hour delivery, and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds,
which covers 86 percent of the items that we deliver.
Bezos says the unmanned aerial vehicle they call an "octocopter" is autonomous,
guided only by GPS coordinates which will tell it where to go within a radius of 16 kilometers.
And that's more than enough for the world's biggest online retailer, which has pushed the envelope in online delivery,
invested heavily in building warehouses it calls "fulfillment centers" close to its customers.
It has 96 centers around the world,
each the size of more than ten football fields
with a capacity to receive more than 300 orders per second on Cyber Monday.
And some of the challenges, well, they're rather obvious in a way.
Bezos says they'll have to make sure a two-kilo package doesn't fall on someone's head.
Media expert Mike [Brian] Stelter says the jury is still out on whether it will work.
I do think there will be some pushback to Amazon's drones.
I think there will also be a lot of people, a lot of geeks like me, who are gonna say this is an amazing experiment.
And it might fail, you know. It might for lots of reasons we can't even imagine end up not working.
But it's a really interesting experiment because it helps us imagine a future where there will be more of these drones.
So don't expect them to be hovering over your doorstep just yet.
U.S. air regulations also have to change.
At the moment, flights like this would be against FAA rules,
but that could change in 2015.
Bezos hopes to begin his version of airmail in four to five years.