Amazon Fire TV UK's most popular streaming player

Fire TV blazes ahead of competition

by Andy Bassett
Movies & TV Shows News

22

Amazon Fire TV UK's most popular streaming player
Recent figures divulged by Amazon show their Fire TV platform as the most popular streaming player across a number of countries, including the UK.
According to Amazon’s Head of Marketing, Growth and Engagement for Fire TV, Jennifer Prenner, the streaming platform now has 34 million active users per month. This is up from 30 million monthly users reported back at the start of 2019, indicating a surge of 4 million new monthly users over the 2019 Q1 period.

This figure places Fire TV as the number one streaming set top box in the US, UK, Germany, India and Japan and puts Fire TV ahead of streaming rivals Roku, Google and Apple. Additionally, Fire TV is readily available in at least 100 other territories.

Despite the promising growth, Amazon will be aware of the acute pressures on the streaming market. Although Apple and Google’s own figures don’t tend to get released, Roku’s recently announced Q1 figures indicated over 29 million active monthly users, up from 27 million at the end of 2018.

Fire TV’s next goal is to expand the platform outside of its own set top devices and encourage TV manufacturers to include it in as one of the services their TVs offer out of the box. This is happening on some Toshiba and Best Buy Insignia models but Amazon is a long way behind the likes of Roku TV and Android TV. In fact, figures presented at Roku’s recent Q1 earnings report demonstrated that Roku TV was the number one selling Smart TV O/S in the US.

According to Prenner though, Amazon sees the Fire TV as more than just a streaming player and the online retail giant’s goal is to utilise the platform as a hub from where the viewer’s smart home can be controlled. For example, to check who is at the front door using a Ring Doorbell or controlling the temperature in the home. This mirrors the aspirations of many other tech corporations such as Google who plans to use its Android TV platform in a similar fashion. Having the Fire TV already installed in so many homes creates an inbuilt user base and gives an advantage over rivals.

However, it’s clear that streaming is at the core of the Fire TV and Amazon plans to support both the Disney+ and Apple TV+ streaming services when they come online later in the year. And of course, the announcement that YouTube was returning to Fire TV after being pulled in 2017 was welcomed by viewers. There are reports, too, of a free, ad-supported news app being developed for the platform.

Source: www.cordcuttersnews.com, www.engadget.com, www.androidheadlines.com, www.essentialinstall.com
Image Source: eBay.com

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