Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipgap98 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon can absolutely do this (but I think it is a slippery slope, possibly a sign of some bad changes ahead at amazon. They really should be neutral about the products listed on their site) but the reason they gave is kinda ridiculous [1]. I have a hard time believing the enough people don't know the difference between Prime & Netflix to make this a legitimate reason to stop selling Chromecast and Apple TV

[1]: Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime," Amazon said in the e-mail. "It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.

View on HN

"Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime," Amazon said in the e-mail. "It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion."

Then make your damn Video application work with the Nexus Player.

It would be so easy for Amazon to support Chromecast. Instead they're losing me as a Prime customer.

I don't get it.

When my subscription expires, I won't get it anymore, either.

Exactly.

The should use the competitor's pages as an opportunity to upsell prime-compatible devices. Show a "Prime Video" logo crossed out that you can click on that takes you to a page telling you why Prime is so much better than whatever you're trying to buy.

(I don't know if that gets into legal hot waters or not, but couldn't be worse than actually not selling competing devices.)

If someone wants to buy an Apple TV, chances are they're just going to go to apple.com to do it, and Amazon has lost the chance to turn that customer over.

Or, you know, just implement Chromecast support in their apps. There's SDKs to do so, and netflix, hulu and others have already done so.

Their lack of support for other devices is almost certainly intentional. (I'm surprised at the amount of sway the hardware teams appear to have over the Prime Video app team. Someone very high up is preventing this from happening for strategic reasons.)

> Amazon can absolutely do this

May, maybe not. It depends if the FTC views this as an anti-competitive move. See https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

"It is unlawful for a company to monopolize or attempt to monopolize trade, meaning a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry."

You can still buy Apple TV or Chromecast Directly, from Best Buy/Walmart, etc. etc.

All Amazon did with this is alienate people like me, who just want Prime to work with the 2 Chromecasts I already own. Good reminder that they are more interested in what they want than what I want.

Yep, I thought the same thing - I've referred the article to the UK Competition and Markets Authority, and to the UK Consumers' Association.

They really should be neutral about the products listed on their site) but the reason they gave is kinda ridiculous

Recall that they've also used the power of their catalog to fight publishers with whom they had pricing model disagreements (e.g. Hachette) by disallowing pre-orders of popular upcoming titles from those publishers.

People have raised this issue before, but it hasn't been taken seriously:

If Google can't show its own products ahead of others in the Google search, why can Amazon show its own products ahead of all the other products on its store on its front-page?

IANAL, but probably because Google has more of a monopoly on web search than Amazon does on online shopping.

Google has dominant marketshare in its industry (search engine), Amazon does not (retail).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com