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Amazon Will Resume Selling Apple TV, Google's Chromecast (axios.com)
Ina Fried, reporting for Axios: Amazon confirmed Thursday that it will again sell the Apple TV set-top box and Google Chromecast dongle. The company had stopped selling the devices amid disputes with both giants. There's a lot of frenemy stuff at play here, with Google, Apple and Amazon all selling their own streaming devices, but also looking to offer their own services on one another's devices. Apple doesn't offer its programing on rival devices, but does move a lot of hardware through Amazon.
I know personally, that in the last week after the AppleTV client launch, I have used Prime Video more than I have since the launch of the service (years ago now).
What happened was, Amazon saw the figures coming in from things like AppleTV clients and realized the simple truth that the way you get people to use your video service more, is to actually let people use it across many devices, not just the ones you sell. Now that the Prime Video client is on Chromecast and AppleTV, every one sold is potentially more prime subscribers for Amazon...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe they listened to their own net neutrality arguments, and realized that (1) it was hypocritical to be arguing for net neutrality against the ISPs while simultaneously blocking competitors from their store. And (2) while a direct opportunity to help their own product sales existed by blocking competitors, there were indirect consequences in that the competitors could block theirs as well. Since it was a zero sum game, there was nothing to be gained by going down that route, and a lot of money to be lost inconveniencing customers just to arrive at the same final destination. (That is to say, progress comes from making your stuff better than others'. Throwing roadblocks in front of others to drag their products down may temporarily help your product get ahead, but it results in a long-term loss for all of society once everyone starts throwing up roadblocks.)
In other news, tit for tat leads the prisoner's dilemma to the optimal solution again.
"Google can scrape the site and show the product offered in all these sites. "
This can be difficult. I don't know about others, but Costco products often have special UPC codes (identifiers). The same item from the mfgr has a different number which is also used by smaller retailers. If Amazon & Walmart do likewise with special codes, it will be harder to compare prices with a Google search. And that's the whole point, of course.
...omphaloskepsis often...