Amazon Reportedly Planning a Free, Ad-supported Video Service for Fire TV Owners (theverge.com)

Amazon is making an even bigger play for the television advertising market with a planned launch of an ad-supported video service specifically for Fire TV device owners, according to a report today from The Information. From a report: The service, which could be called Free Dive, is said to be very close in concept to the Roku Channel, an ad-supported free video service for Roku streaming devices and smart TVs that's helped the device maker grow its platform business. These services tend to offer a random mix of older catalog content, but they're free to stream. The Information estimates Amazon has around 48 million customers who own a Fire TV device, either in the form of a HDMI stick, a more powerful and 4K-equipped HDMI dongle, and the new, Alexa-enabled Fire Cube.

Comments

Seems to miss the mark entirely

[The_Revelation]

I'm sure there are some people that will subject themselves to advertisements willingly, but I think Amazon may be missing out on the consumer segment that uses their products. In my country the antenna was unplugged about 17 years ago. We own a television (multiple in fact - can't get rid of them) and yet we don't take advantage of the free television on offering and instead pay for streaming services that don't have advertisements. So, it makes me wonder who is buying Amazon Fire tv units for their television units in order to receive the benefit of accessing an advertising supported service typically available for free to television units without the requirement of owning an Amazon Fire tv unit in addition to a television unit. I guess as another example, last time I bought someone a Kindle Paperwhite, I didn't even consider buying them the slightly cheaper 'Ad' supported model because why would I pay good money for something so that a marketing company can lie to my friends? If Amazon sent out an Ad supported model of the Kindle Paperwhite 'for free', I am sure a lot of consumers would take them up on that offer, but when you ask people to essentially pay for a product that comes with Ads, your pushing a product with very little value.