Apple used its Worldwide Developers Conference this week to announce that the Amazon Video app will now play on the latest generation of its Apple TV OTT devices.
While it has been available on rival OTT device maker Roku’s streaming boxes since 2011, the Amazon app has been conspicuously absent on Apple TV. Meanwhile, Apple TV and Google Chromecast have both been conspicuously left out of Amazon’s online retail market.
Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed rumors of the inclusion in an aside during his keynote at the WWDC Monday, an event covered by CNET.
The Amazon Video app has been available for iPhone and iPad devices for some time, but in a stripped-down format that doesn’t allow transactional movie and TV show rentals and purchases. It’s unclear as to whether the Apple TV version of the app will support purchasing. Apple hasn’t commented.
In 2015, Amazon made the decision to not carry Apple’s or Google’s streaming media devices on its website. The company said it wasn’t a competition-based decision; it was merely done because Apple TV and Chromecast were not ideal for streaming Amazon Prime Video programming.
For Amazon, it would officially bring its SVOD service to a large chunk of the streaming set-top box market from which it was previously absent. According to comScore, Apple media devices hold the highest share of U.S. households at 24.1%. The Amazon Prime Video app is already available for iOS devices, so it addresses a large part of that market segment.