Enlarge / The new Apple TV. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Over the weekend, Amazon's tech support team confirmed that Amazon is working on a Prime Video app for the new Apple TV. Amazon has become a major player in the streaming video field over the last two or three years, and the service's absence on Apple's newest streaming box is one of its biggest holes relative to competing boxes from the likes of Roku and Amazon itself. As of the end of October, Amazon officially had nothing to share about an Apple TV app, so this news is a welcome reversal.
This is notable partly because Amazon pulled the Apple TV and Google's budget-friendly Chromecast from its store back in October. Though all of those devices just happen to compete with Amazon's own hardware, the reason given at the time was that those boxes didn't mesh well with Prime Video streaming service. In addition to the Fire TV and Fire TV stick, Amazon continues to stock the Roku lineup and a bunch of minor-league players that don't support Prime Video but were apparently not important enough to delist.
Apple served as a gatekeeper for the third-generation Apple TV, so the move sort of makes sense for that box—the only way to stream Prime Video on that model is to use AirPlay from an iPhone or iPad running Amazon's app, an experience that is subpar at best. But Amazon just happened to delist Apple's boxes at the same time as Apple was releasing a new fourth-generation model with a full SDK and App Store. In other words, the only thing keeping Amazon from adding Prime Video support to the Apple TV was Amazon, since the company already offers an app for iOS and tvOS offers many of the same capabilities.
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