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Amazon

For more than than 15 years, Amazon has worked to build a reputation every bit the "everything" shop, where about any product you might desire to (legally) purchase tin can be establish and ordered. The company has now announced that this will no longer be the case. By October 29, no listings for either Google'south Chromecast or Apple tree's Apple tree Idiot box will be accepted at Amazon. The company's reasoning?

"Over the last 3 years, Prime number Video has become an important part of Prime," an Amazon representative stated. "It's of import that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, XBOX, PlayStation and Fire Television set are excellent choices."

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The reason Amazon is making this change has nil to do with the usefulness of Prime Video. By most measurements, less than xx% of Amazon users buy Amazon Prime in the starting time place. Furthermore, there's admittedly cipher stopping Amazon from creating an Android awarding that includes Chromecast support. Granted, Apple's walled garden is a much tougher nut to cleft, but there are already workarounds and options available on the Android side of the equation.

The fact that Amazon is only banning two competitor devices is besides quite indicative of the company's actual stop goals. How many TVs, later all, don't back up streaming Amazon Prime number video? How many tablets? Why has this suddenly go an issue at present that new Chromecast and Apple Tv's have launched, rather than months ago?

From Everything Store to walled garden

Amazon'southward CEO, Jeff Bezos, has previously boasted that Amazon Prime number customers spend an boilerplate of $1,500 per year at Amazon, compared to just $625 for regular shoppers. If that's true, information technology ways that Amazon Prime customers account for a disproportional corporeality of the site's overall revenue — and Amazon has every reason to effort to lock them into its ain ecosystem. This push explains the increased advertizement presence on the newly designed FireOS, equally well as the mostly lower-quality experience on these devices — Amazon is stepping up its lock-in.

This has nothing to do with customer confusion. Instead, information technology's a button to create an Amazon-like wall around video content, the aforementioned mode Apple walls basically everything, and Google locks down Android. For a company that often credits its ain operating system as the anti-Google when it comes to not gathering personal information about its users, Amazon is all too willing to enact lockouts that ensure customers take choice but to use its own products.

For a visitor that squawked so loudly nearly Apple tree's illegal bunco with publishers, Amazon has no issues abusing its own dominant market place position to ensure customers are guided towards its own products and away from others. Roku ought to be looking over its shoulder. Netflix would almost certainly already be on the chopping block, if Amazon thought it could go abroad with it.