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Comment by shadowfiend | Hacker News Reader

Bloomberg itself reported in 2016 that fees were halved for all video streaming services: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/apple-is-... . You could take this to mean that rather than negotiate a special rate for Amazon, they changed App Store rules for a whole category on the store, informed by discussions with Amazon.

Hard to know if that's actually how it went down based on the info that's out there right now though.

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A more recent change (April 2020) is that Amazon lets you buy/rent movies in their apps, and if you have billing info set up through Amazon it goes through that instead of Apple, presumably bypassing Apple's cut. If you don't, payment goes through Apple's system, probably at the reduced 15% cut.

Apple commented to 9to5mac that this is part of a "program for premium subscription video entertainment providers," and it has some strings attached - integration with the TV app, AirPlay 2, universal search and single sign-on integration.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/01/purchases-amazon-prime-video/

From a business perspective I can see why they'd offer this, integration with the TV app and universal search means that users access content through that, so you're putting in extra work in order to mix your content in with everyone else's and give up the chance to upsell whatever else is on offer through your own app. When they first launched the new Apple TV system with its TV app, streaming providers didn't seem very keen on the idea of integrating. Cutting to 15% in exchange lets the providers keep more of their revenue, and lets Apple create the integrated experience that they want to offer.

I wish those restrictions would include forcing providers to support AirPlay. Amazon Prime recently cut off airplay support (last year). ”Due to technical limitations and to improve the user experience“ but we all know it’s for business reasons or possibly DRM reasons. Netflix and other video apps followed shortly thereafter once they saw Apple didn’t retaliate. Now they all say you should use their official smart TV apps, but that doesn’t work with older Apple TV set-top boxes and it’s a worse experience all around regardless (at least in my opinion, I know some people disagree or don’t care one way or the other, but now it’s no longer an option for people like me who do prefer the AirPlay experience). AirPlay used to be one of the major selling points of iPhones for me, but now it’s only useful on pirated media where you have the .mp4 file...

(and to preempt the counterargument about just using Chromecast, for whatever reason in my experience across a multitude of devices Chromecast has always been extremely unstable, and often is more hassle than it’s worth. Nowadays I just put an iPad on my coffee table and watch that even though I have a huge TV sitting on the wall a few feet away)

Trade vape tobacco juice with your teenagers for pirate downloads, and give them an MBA when they cut you out.

netflix is even more wierd. you need to have an account to use it on iphone/ipad, because with that they can go around the apple fee.

the problem here is that they are big enough to do it, if you are small apple might not like it.

That’s how Amazon was until recently. You could rent a movie in your web browser and then watch it on device, or watch anything with your prime subscription, but otherwise it just told you videos weren’t available on the device.

It might not have been Amazon but HBO. This story related to the Apple TV was in 2015.

https://www.vox.com/2015/4/13/11561392/how-to-beat-apples-30...

My reading of the Vox story you linked is that Apple started Apple TV apps off at 15%, then the 2016 change standardized this rate to all video streaming apps (which makes it seem like it could have been a simplification of the rules overall, though that's not clear from either story).

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