“Amazon and Apple may have reached a truce,” Peter Kafka and Jason Del Rey report for Recode. “The tech giants, who are increasingly competing for customers’ time, eyeballs and money, are close to an agreement to bring an Amazon video app to Apple’s Apple TV set-top box, according to people familiar with the two companies.”
“Amazon employees expect the app to show up on Apple’s hardware in the third quarter of the year,” Kafka and Del Rey report. “That move would allow Amazon Prime Video subscribers to easily watch TV shows and movies from the service using Apple TV. For the past few years, Amazon subscribers have only been able to watch their shows on Apple TV using Apple’s comparatively cumbersome Airplay system, which involves connecting another Apple product, like an iPhone, to an Apple TV using a wifi connection.”
Kafka and Del Rey report, “It’s unclear what got the two companies to reach an agreement, though some industry observers suggest that any pact would have been worked out, at a high level, by CEOs Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Grand Tour, on our Apple TV, natively? Clarkson, Hammond and May, oh my!
Now, hopefully, this means Amazon.com will also begin to sell Apple TV and maybe even allow us to buy/rent directly from the Amazon Prime Video app instead of having to visit Amazon’s site.
Yay!
Prefer my FireTV HD over my AppleTV 4 anyway. Easier to navigate. The Apple remote is a royal pain to use.
Remote looks COOL.
But it’s a pain to use in the dark. Needs dots or texture to help indicate which side is up and which end is pointing at the TV.
buy the strap that goes into the lightning end. No more problem
actually, not a bad idea.
Great news. I was thinking of buying an iPod touch solely to play Prime videos through AirPlay. It’s annoying as hell to do it with an iOS device that you want to use while watching.
R O K U.
I have the current Apple TV in my office and bought a top of the line 4K ROKU for my bedroom TV and frankly the Roku functions okay but is nothing to write home about. In fact I noticed stupid things like if not shut off right on the home screen the battery drains in the remote. Say what?? That’s crazy.
The ROKU is so superior to the ATV, it’s laughable. Not only do the menus and graphics look so much better, it has 4K support, and you can plug headphones into the remote for private listening. ATV cant do those. And the remote has a fabric tab, to use for orientation in darkened rooms. Plus it has Amazon prime…duh…ATV is ancient, major behind the curve tech. Oh yes, And an Apple Hobby.
Totally agree. I was forced out of the Apple eco-system and like were I landed. Roku is great!
ATV supports bluetooth headphones for private listening as well as bluetooth keyboards and game controllers. It works very well with my Harmony remote too. I rarely touch the Apple remote.
Wish I could install Kodi on my AppleTV!!!!
Lack of Amazon is only the reason I have 4 Roku’s and zero Apple TV’s. I hope they fix this! Apple should have learned from iOS that the quickest way to success is opening up the platform. Roku has so many more channels to choose from….
One big looser for this is ROKU. I have a ROKU, Apple TV and TiVO. Barely use the TiVO anymore and only use the ROKU for Amazon Prime. I far prefer the Apple TV to the ROKU for everthing except (as folks have pointed out) the remote, can’t believe how often I turn the damn thing around backward.
There is absolutely nothing that Apple TV can accomplish that Roku cannot.
Amazon, not so sure I need it. The Grand Tour turned out to be a major disappointment of squabbling has-been hosts, so no unique programming I need from Amazon. Top Gear on BBC instead.
I see this a more of a win for Amazon than for Apple unless the content index is accessible from the Apple TV interface. For example, if you subscribe to a premium channel like Showtime as an App on ATV you can’t search it and the iTunes library with a consolidated interface. You might as well subscribe to Showtime form within the Amazon App (or if Apple will take a cut and Amazon raises the in-App price 30% to compensate, you may be directed to subscribe via the Amazon video website) and have a single interface to search all your Amazon videos AND Showtime shows with a single interface. Apple may stem the ebb of ATV users but just end up being another HW platform that Amazon Video will be the primary App used rather than search at the ATV ‘home’ level for all but video media purchased from Apple.
Oh really?
well… I don’t care. I got tired about waiting for this news.
So I just finally got the new Amazon Fire TV Stick with Alexa Remote for ONLY 40€ (in Germany) and I am REALLY SATISFIED with it. It is just great! it’s easy, it’s stable, it works!
I can actually use Airplay from my iPhone to send internet videos direct to the Fire Stick!
I can also watch german television with just using the Zattoo App.
So, unless for me, it does not make any sense expending a lot of money on something that does not support some important services, like Amazon Prime.