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Comment by eugeniub | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon would have to pay Apple a share of the proceeds which might be a problem since the margins are already pretty low.

Not true. Amazon can still have an app on Apple TV, and Apple won't get a cut, if Amazon sells subscriptions through their website instead of the app. That's what they're already doing on iOS at least.

> And lastly lets not forget that a Fire TV stick costs 40$....

This is the problem, not the solution. Nobody wants one device per service. I don't want an Apple TV for Apple stuff, a Fire stick for Amazon, a Roku for something else, and so on. It's annoying, and my TV doesn't have that many HDMI ports.

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It's not about the subscriptions it's about the rentals and the purchases, it could've changed since then but Prime Video doesn't support purchasing on mobile which makes it irrelevant for the TV.

>This is the problem, not the solution. Nobody wants one device per service. I don't want an Apple TV for Apple stuff, a Fire stick for Amazon, a Roku for something else, and so on. It's annoying, and my TV doesn't have that many HDMI ports.

Isn't it funny that this is an Apple problem always?

Yup. I have a fire stick, it's fantastic. It does everything, and if there's something it doesn't do then I can likely make it do it somehow, because it's just an android device that I'm free to sideload regular APKs on to.

I love the damn thing, best £30 I've spent in a long long time. It does Prime video, it does netflix, it does spotify, it does plex, kodi, it does sonic 2 for fuck's sake.

Whoa, I have two FireTV sticks and didn't know it had Kodi or Sonic 2 apps. Going to have to look at that when I get home

Yup, you can get Sonic 1, 2 and CD on the amazon store, IIRC you'll have to sideload kodi though, not a massively difficult task. It's as simple as turning on developer mode in the settings and then using an app on your phone to adb install the kodi APK to the fire stick. You can also just use adb in a terminal on your PC or whatever, up to you - but there's some apps on the play store that make it super easy.

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