This smells fishy, when Amazon could just develop an Apple TV app now that Apple has opened the floodgates, (and they had the clout to before) and Chromecast is fairly trivial for them to implement.
The question is, why now, and why these devices? They didn’t stop selling these devices before, and they haven’t stopped selling other Android or Windows Phone devices, which do not support Prime streaming without loopholes, if at all.
It’s very strange, yes. It’s as if they’re prioritizing hardware sales over movie rentals - but the hardware sale is a one-time relatively cheap purchase, so why would they do that?
Someone floated the idea of them needing to make money back after the disaster of Fire Phone - focusing sales onto Fire TV could do the trick.
I would think that they’d treat their hardware as a loss-leader, to encourage people to pay for Prime Video, so even more reason to make Prime Video play on Chromcast/Apple TV. /shrug
Yeah - that’s the business model that has worked for every other online video provider. Focus on the content.
I imagine it’s possible their explanation is true. They have access to sales return data we don’t. If 20% of Apple TVs get returned “doesn’t work with prime” I think they have a valid reason. But we don’t know the numbers.
I was going to say they don’t sell e-readers that don’t work with kindle books, but they do. But they aren’t sold by Amazon directly. And perhaps fewer people go to Amazon to buy a nook only to return it. Similarly, I doubt many people buy phones expecting Prime support and return them later.
This has all the flavor of monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, but it’s not like Apple and Google don’t have their own online stores. Amazon is hardly shutting them out.
I buy most things through Amazon, often because they offer better support. But I never buy Apple products from them. Apple support is also pretty good, and I’d prefer to avoid any possible middleman trouble there.
Agreed with all of that; it’s not clear that Amazon is doing anything wrong per se, just obnoxious.
As a detail, in this case their announcement does explicitly apply to third parties who sell via Amazon.