Amazon Prime Video Strangely Missing from Apple TV

| October 30, 2015 | Amazon | No Comments

amazon instant video prime

Apple TV’s newest edition has taken a few giant steps forward, especially with the Siri functionality that has been the talk of the town. The device is already seeing plenty of press and critical acclaim of their moves forward in both intelligent recommendations as well as a more open app environment.

But fans of the device will likely notice one major player missing from the streaming device’s app store, Amazon Prime Video’s streaming service.

As this news site has commented many times, there is an unfriendly pressure building up across the device and streaming service landscape, with fights for market share getting tougher and tougher. Amazon has already announced that at the end of this month they will be pulling all Apple TV and Google Chromecast’s from their ecommerce store.

According to BuzzFeed’s review of the Apple TV, this is an intentional move by Amazon, and not Apple TV retaliating against the streaming service, stating that all developers are welcome on the platform. Amazon told BuzzFeed they had nothing to add to the story.

With Amazon claiming the reason they removed Apple TV from amazon.com being that they were trying to avoid confusion when it came to selling devices that don’t offer Amazon Prime Video options, all of the sudden their argument starts to unravel. Specifically, if Amazon’s stated intentions are true, why wouldn’t the ecommerce giant simply develop a streaming app for the Apple TV platform and continue selling Apple TV devices? Certainly the average Amazon customer is worse off if they are unable to buy Apple TV from the website.

If Apple is being truthful about Amazon being free to develop a Prime Video app on the platform and we have no reason to believe they wouldn’t be, then Amazon comes out looking worse here by limiting the reach of their video streaming service. As an Amazon Prime Video subscriber myself, it has been awfully complicated having to work around the service’s blocking of using some third party devices.

Strangely, Amazon has developed streaming apps on a number of devices, such as Roku, and then of course they offer it on their own Amazon Fire TV. We will hunt for clarity on this and of course report back when we have more information.