Amazon will no longer sell Chromecast, Apple TV

For more than 15 years, Amazon has worked to build a reputation as the “everything” store, where virtually any product you might want to (legally) purchase can be found and ordered. The company has now announced that this will no longer be the case. By October 29, no listings for either Google’s Chromecast or Apple’s Apple TV will be accepted at Amazon. The company’s reasoning?
“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” an Amazon representative stated. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, XBOX, PlayStation and Fire TV are excellent choices.”

The reason Amazon is making this change has nothing to do with the usefulness of Prime Video. By most measurements, less than 20% of Amazon users buy Amazon Prime in the first place. Furthermore, there’s absolutely nothing stopping Amazon from creating an Android application that includes Chromecast support. Granted, Apple’s walled garden is a much tougher nut to crack, 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 also quite indicative of the company’s actual end goals. How many TVs, after all, don’t support streaming Amazon Prime video? How many tablets? Why has this suddenly become an issue now that new Chromecast and Apple TV’s have launched, rather than months ago?

From Everything Store to walled garden

Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has previously boasted that Amazon Prime customers spend an average of $1,500 per year at Amazon, compared to just $625 for regular shoppers. If that’s true, it means that Amazon Prime customers account for a disproportional amount of the site’s overall revenue — and Amazon has every reason to try to lock them into its own ecosystem. This push explains the increased ad presence on the newly designed FireOS, as well as the generally lower-quality experience on these devices — Amazon is stepping up its lock-in.
This has nothing to do with customer confusion. Instead, it’s a push to create an Amazon-like wall around video content, the same way Apple walls basically everything, and Google locks down Android. For a company that often credits its own 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 have choice but to use its own products.
For a company that squawked so loudly about Apple’s illegal collusion with publishers, Amazon has no problems abusing its own dominant market 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 get away with it.