As per a report from Bloomberg, Amazon will be banning sales of Apple TV and Chromecast from its store. The reason behind this is said to be the lack of Amazon’s Prime Video support on these devices.
As per Bloomberg:
The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast since those devices don’t “interact well” with Prime Video. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Prime Video doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.
This is a weird move by Amazon due to many reasons:
- The new Apple TV has an SDK, tvOS, which allows third party developers to develop apps for it. Similarly, Google offers an SDK for Chromecast. This means that Amazon should be able to develop apps for these devices, just like HBO, ESPN, Netflix and tons of other popular video streaming companies.
- There are Amazon video apps which support Prime Video in App Store and Google Play Store and they work perfectly fine. Amazon has not announced that it will be removing those apps which means that there is no technical issue that stops them from making apps for those platforms. There is no reasons that other giants in the video streaming space can make apps for Apple and Google’s streaming devices while Amazon cannot.
It might be easy to explain that Amazon is doing this to increase sales and subscribers of Prime Video but it does not make sense. By all means, this is a dick move by Amazon which is already getting a lot of backlash across media.
