Amazon Banning Apple TV And Chromecast Sales
The new Chromecast is now available for purchase but customers will now have one less avenue to purchase Google’s streaming device. In a rather controversial move, Amazon has put a ban on both Chromecast and Apple TV sales through the online retail giant. Current listings will all disappear on October 29th while no new listing are allowed at all. Amazon’s reason seems pretty weak and can be seen below:
“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” Amazon said in the e-mail, which was sent to sellers yesterday. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”
As you can see, their argument of “customer confusion” is pretty weak. Obviously, Amazon is banning these sales to try boost usage of their own streaming service. Problem is that their streaming service isn’t very widely available and in my opinion, this move will do more harm than good.
Luckily, we can still grab the Chromecast directly from Google and soon we’ll be able to buy it at BestBuy stores.