It's clear that Amazon doesn't want to sell products that compete with its own Fire TV streaming hardware. It might have dressed this whole thing up as a service to the customer, but it has never been more utterly transparent that the firm feels threatened by Apple TV and Google Chromecast.
Of course Amazon denies that it is removing products because they threaten sales of its own hardware. In a response from its PR team the company told me:
Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime. 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.
I've been spun some lines in my time, but that one takes the biscuit. What Amazon is implying with this response is that removing services without Prime Video is a service to customers. It is attempting to stop confusion. Nice try Amazon, but customers simply aren't so naive as to launch into a product purchase without understanding what they want. Many customers won't even be Prime subscribers, so to eradicate entire lines from stock based on that seems very silly indeed. So silly, in fact, that I don't personally believe a single word of it.
This story gets more interesting though when you look at the products that Amazon is endorsing. Two are games consoles, so presumably seen as no threat to sales of Fire TV. The inclusion of Roku puzzled me though, as it is a competitor to Amazon. So I had a look into it and guess what I found. The director of Fire TV at Amazon is a man called Tim Twerdahl who was previously Vice President of Consumer Products at, you guessed it, Roku. Mr Twerdahl did leave Roku in 2009 but it's hard to know if he still has some financial interest in the company.
But ignoring the inclusion of Roku in this statement, what about the claim that Apple TV and Google's Chromecast don't "interact well" with Prime Video. Whose fault is that, exactly? Well, my feeling is that any poor interaction lies at Amazon's feet. Amazon has, in my opinion, done everything it can to make using Prime near-impossible on Google's Android devices.
To give you an example, here's what's involved in watching Prime Video on an Android phone. Bear in mind that all of this could easily be solved by Amazon submitting a Prime Video app to Google Play. Instead, Amazon asks that customers go to its website to download its Amazon Underground app. This is the new version of its App Store. To install this on an Android phone, you need to disable app security, to allow untrusted sources to install on your device.
Once you've done that you need to then download an Amazon Prime Video app, which will then allow you to watch your Prime Video subscription content on your phone. But Amazon has deliberately not included support for Google Chromecast within the app. It's impossible to stream video to a Chromecast. This is entirely Amazon's decision and the reason Android devices, including Android TV platforms don't play well with Amazon Prime Video is that Amazon refuses to allow them to.
Amazon has, therefore removed devices from sale because it has taken the decision not to support its own streaming video service. The only logical conclusion to take from this is that Amazon wanted to remove the competition from its storefront. From a business point-of-view this might work, or it might backfire, but arguably Amazon is free to do it. Perhaps the worst part is Amazon's decision to hide the truth behind a flimsy excuse that simply doesn't hold up to even a tiny amount of scrutiny.
Perhaps the saddest part of this whole debacle is that Amazon's Fire TV is one of my favourite streaming media products. It's sensibly-priced, does pretty much everything I want from a streamer and has some great gaming features too. Fire TV stands alone, without the need to sabotage other products, so why Amazon has gone down this route is utterly beyond me.
