Amazon to “Invade” Europe by Expanding its Fire TV Business
- Amazon is about to announce the expansion of its Fire TV business across Europe.
- This is a move that they hope will give them the crown in the growing set-top box market.
- Right now, their main competition comes from Roku, who are equally weak in Europe.
According to a Bloomberg report, Amazon is looking to expand its Fire TV business to several European markets, reaching out to a new audience. Already, Amazon is present in the United Kingdom, Austria, and Germany, but this was just the beginning for the tech giant. Fire TV is Amazon’s digital media player device that allows people to stream content via the internet. While there are many TV boxes out there, the Fire TV comes with Amazon Prime Video content, Hulu, History Channel, CBS, BBC News, Bloomberg TV, Spotify, Vimeo, NBA, and even Netflix.
Powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon solutions, the box, stick, and dongle are all capable to stream 4K content, covering the vast majority of the consumers’ need right now. The countries that will see Fire TV enter their market have not been announced yet, but according to Bloomberg, they will be during a special event that will be held in Europe next week. Most probably, we will see the launch of a new initiative that will involve new deals with media companies and even TV manufacturers who sell products in European markets. Hopefully, we will see the services expand across the whole union and not just a handful of countries.
European audiences are already shifting away from cable TV subscriptions, in the same way, that northern American audience did during the past years. Roku TV boxes have been conquering the free ground that has been expanding. Analysts claim that Roku has already captured 40% of this growing global market pie, while Amazon comes 2nd with 30%. With Europe being the epicenter of this growth right now, it makes perfect business sense for Amazon to want to establish their foothold there. Streaming services aren’t the sole goal here, as data collection from viewers remains a reliable source of huge income and business insight for media companies.
To clarify, the “Basic” edition of the Fire TV stick was already available across almost every European country since quite some time now. The basic edition however offered only a limited set of content and services, was limited to a maximum streaming quality of full-HD (1080p), and came with dated hardware (1 GB RAM, MediaTek CPU). The most important of all was that the content was limited to “Prime Video”, so it was a somewhat “tight” package.
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