Amazon has followed through on its plans to go nuclear on its competitors: The company removed all listings of Apple’s Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast streaming adapter from its website Thursday.
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This includes listings from third-party resellers, as well as used and previous-generation devices sold through Amazon’s marketplace.
In an effort to boost both its Prime Video subscriptions as well as sales of its Fire TV set top box and Fire TV Stick units, Amazon.com has pulled both the Chromecast and the Apple TV from its shelves.
Blaming missing support for Amazon video on Google and Apple is somewhat misleading: Chromecast has long had an open SDK, allowing any publisher to add casting to their mobile apps.
E-commerce giant Amazon announced on October 1 it would stop selling the Apple and Google content-streaming devices in an attempt to minimize the competition against its own content-streaming gadgets, but the rest of the Internet is still selling them.
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Amazon says it’s to “avoid customer confusion” since Prime Video is a big part of the Prime experience, but the argument rings hollow: there’s no clear reason why Amazon can’t simply put its own fully featured apps on those storefronts, particularly since a universal iOS app can run on the new Apple TV out today. What is fairly amusing is that the latest version of the Apple TV does have an app store and Amazon could easily port in an app for it. The Google Chromecast is priced at $35 and the Apple TV costs $69.
