Amazon reportedly has settled on plans for expanding availability of its Fire TV streaming devices in Europe.
According to Bloomberg, the company this week will reveal a “handful of new markets” in Europe that will add to Fire TV’s current availability in the U.K. and Germany. The company also reportedly will announce new deals with media companies.
The expansion will let Amazon’s Fire TV streaming devices – which include lower cost streaming sticks and more full-featured DVRs for broadcast television – to better compete with Apple and Roku.
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Amazon Fire TV has more than 34 million active users according to the company’s most recently publicly disclosed count.
Jen Prenner, general manager and global head of marketing of growth and engagement for Amazon Fire TV, said during the Pay TV Show in May that the platform’s growth has seen momentum in 2019, and that Fire TV devices are the top streaming media players in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, India and Japan.
In the U.S., Fire TV and Roku are locked in a close race for the streaming player market.
According to TDG’s “Benchmarking the Connected Consumer 2019” research—which is the 10th annual occurrence of the firm’s user survey—just more than 30% of adult broadband users have a streaming box, and 38% have a streaming stick. The data shows that while Roku has approximately 51% share of the streaming box market in the U.S., the company has only about 30% of the market for streaming sticks. Fire TV, on the other hand, only has 28.5% share of the U.S. streaming box market but nearly 57% of the streaming stick share of U.S. households.
Although Roku has expanded to markets including Mexico and parts of western Europe, the company still earns most of its sales in the U.S., where the company said its smart TV operating system is in one of every three smart TVs sold.