by Dan Moren
Amazon to stop selling Chromecasts, Apple TVs
As per this article in BloombergBusiness, Amazon’s not going to sell streaming devices made by Google or Apple anymore:
“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” Amazon said in the e-mail. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”
First off, as a retailer, Amazon absolutely has the right to carry or not carry whatever products it wants to. And yes, right now playing back videos from Amazon on your Apple TV means using AirPlay to get them from an iOS device to the set-top box.
But it seems strange to make this move just a few weeks ahead of the appearance of the new Apple TV for which Amazon could, presumably, develop an app for watching video–just as they have with iOS.
Understandably, the in-app purchase rules that require Amazon to fork over a percentage of sales to Apple aren’t going to fly if you just want to rent or buy a movie or TV show from Amazon. It’s the same reason that the Kindle and Comixology apps on iOS don’t support purchasing through the app–just viewing content that’s previously been bought.
I can appreciate that Amazon would like to push people towards a Fire TV or Fire TV Stick rather than an Apple TV, but at its heart, Amazon is still a retailer, not a hardware developer. So why not take some money out of the iTunes Store’s pocket, at least as far as Prime Video is concerned?