Disney+ Will Not Appear On Amazon Fire TV At Launch
To paraphrase Master Yoda: “Begun the streaming wars, have…” Reports say Disney+ will not be available to Amazon Fire TV users at launch.
No Amazon Fire TV Access for Disney+
Today, Stephen Lovely of The Motley Fool financial site wrote:
- The debut of Disney+ is just a couple of months away, and word is the streaming service will launch with a catalog less than a fifth the size of Netflix’s.
- It also will carry a smaller, $6.99 monthly price tag, and will be supported by all the major streaming platforms — with one glaring exception.
- At launch, Disney‘s service won’t be available on Amazon‘s Fire TV. Despite being one of the two dominant platforms in the streaming player market — the other is Roku‘s eponymous platform — Fire TV is getting the cold shoulder in the biggest new video-on-demand launch since Hulu.
Sure, we could assume that Disney will get around to making nice with Amazon. But maybe they won’t…
Not An Accident
Lovely added:
It’s not unusual for streaming services to launch with incomplete platform support, but they typically start with at least support from both Roku and Fire TV. When there are exceptions, it’s usually a reflection of a rivalry: For instance, Alphabet‘s (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) YouTube TV wasn’t available on Amazon’s Fire TV until July — more than a year after it debuted — but that’s to be expected given the feud between the tech giants.
Could the Fire TV issue just be an unfortunate miscue related to the Disney+ development schedule? Unlikely. Disney+ will work on Android and Android TV at launch, and Fire TV is built on Android. Indeed, the platforms are so similar that users can upload Android apps to Fire TV as .apk files and run them in developer mode. (They don’t always work perfectly, given the lack of a touch screen, but they do load.) And Amazon directly tells developers that they can put the same exact apps in the Amazon Appstore and the Google Play Store.
It’s hard to see Disney+ launching with an app for Android TV but without one for the more-popular Fire TV as anything other than intentional.
So What?
So what does that mean for all of us content hungry Disney fans. For me, for example, it means nothing. I am on Apple-based systems as well as Amazon TV. NBD.
Disney doesn’t yet have a platform or hub on [the scale of Apple TV or Amazon], but it may have the makings of one. Subscribers to Hulu, which Disney controls, can add HBO to their subscriptions and browse HBO content within the Hulu app. The money goes through Disney’s hands on its way to HBO. It’s not quite Amazon Channels yet, but if it’s ever going to be, it can’t hurt to take a shot at Fire TV now.
In all likelihood, Fire TV support for Disney+ will be added at some point after launch, but even a relatively short delay is best read as intentional on Disney’s part. Disney clearly has its reasons for wanting to keep Fire TV out of its launch day celebration.
Stay tuned…