When Best Buy and Amazon announced their partnership this morning to make and sell new Fire TV Edition televisions running Amazon’s Fire TV operation system, it was great news for Fire TV fans because it will bring new hardware options to the Fire TV line. It turns out that the multi-year deal between the two companies goes a bit deeper because, not only is Best Buy going to start making Fire TV Edition televisions under their Insignia brand, they’re also going to be dropping Roku TV televisions.
Best Buy currently sells 8 Insignia models running Roku TV OS and has made about 40 different Roku TVs total. Once the current lineup of Insignia Roku TVs go out of stock, it’ll be strictly replaced with Insignia TVs running Fire TV OS.
The fact that Best Buy isn’t going to continue making Roku TVs is a significant win for Amazon and for the Fire TV Edition television’s future. Roku’s stock is down over 9% this morning, at the time of this writing, presumably as a result of this news. Best Buy will very likely continue to sell Roku TVs by other manufacturers, but dropping Roku TV OS in favor of Fire TV OS in their own hardware for the forseeable future is indicative of Amazon’s success in the market.
Amazon still has a lot of catching up to do with Fire TV OS running on televisions. Roku first licensed their software to TV manufacturers in 2014 and leads the market of TVs running 3rd-party operating systems. Google followed suit the next year with the first televisions running Android TV in 2015. Amazon enteredthe space in 2017 with the 1st generation of Fire TV Edition televisions, but is quickly gaining ground, thanks to todays announcement with Best Buy, Insignia, and Toshiba.
Do we know if it’s the FireTV simple UI?
Otherwise they’ll fail. I only recommend FireTV devices to those that have Prime.
Otherwise Amazon’s content is overwhelming.
I agree. They need clean up their interface, it’s a mess. I have AFTVs and Roku sticks and even the simple Roku interface is miles better.
I’m no Roku fan, but, for OTA’ers, the Roku TV is a home run. This is a mistake.
Total mistake on their part, Roku OS is extra simple and just works.
Fire tv is for people that want added capabilities and not your normal joe
Beta vs VHS over and over and over again. Arrrrgggghhhhh, why does the better product rarely win?