Amazon aims to expand its Fire TV business in India through partnerships

Faster to market

“There's a very large potential here. There are a lot of common customers, and I think both the partners are very excited to bring the best of their abilities into this. Hopefully, in the future, we will bring more partners on board in India,” Parag Gupta, director and country manager for Amazon Devices India, told Moneycontrol.

With Xiaomi, Amazon now has tie-ups with four brands in India including Onida, Akai, and Croma. Globally, Amazon has 160 brands on Fire TV. Amazon has previously worked with Xiaomi to launch Fire TV-based smart televisions in France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and Germany in the past year.

Amazon plans to use its expertise to improve the go-to-market initiatives for some of its partners, Gupta said. “We are able to partner with them right from design to product and tech innovations, testing, certifications, helping them with bringing up the manufacturing line,” he said.

This also enables companies to bring their smart televisions to the market faster. In the case of Xiaomi, the time taken from the initial meeting to the product hitting the street was about six to seven months, Gupta said.

These developments come when rival Google faces an antitrust probe by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged abuse of market dominance in the country's smart television market.

Android TV had 66% market share in India in 2022 while Fire OS has only 1% share in the country, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research.

In its submission to the CCI that was disclosed as part of CCI's Android antitrust ruling in October 2022, Amazon had stated that it had experienced "significant difficulties in finding OEM partners to manufacture smart TVs running its Fire OS". At least seven manufacturers had told the company that they won't be able to make Fire OS-based smart TVs due to their contractual commitments to Google, it said. Gupta declined to comment on this matter.

In January 2023, Google announced sweeping changes to its Android business to comply with the CCI's directives in the Android antitrust order, while continuing to dispute the ruling. NCLAT is currently hearing arguments on the matter.

DTH set top box integration

A key feature that could be a differentiator for Fire TV is DTH set-top box integration, which allows consumers to switch between direct-to-home (DTH) television channels and video streaming apps with a single remote.

Viewers will be able to access playback control features such as play and pause, control volume and other features such as electronic programming guide. The feature currently supports DTH services from Tata Play, Airtel, Videocon d2h and Sun Direct with plans to add more partners in the future, Gupta said.

Fire TV allows the creation of six viewer profiles, each with its own content recommendations, watchlist, live TV preferences and viewing history. These features help reduce friction that consumers face in finding, accessing and watching content, Gupta said.

Scope for innovation

"All our content preferences, be it how we watch, what we watch, when we want to watch and with whom we want to watch, are changing very rapidly. That's one area where we think that there is a lot of innovation that is yet to happen, and Fire TV will be at the centre of it," he said.

India as a market is particularly important and strategic because the regional content, dialects and variations in connectivity across the country pose unique challenges, Gupta said.

"When we envision the TV of the future, it isn't just about stellar hardware or experiences or the ability to find a variety of content. It's also about making the TV a centrepiece for what we at Amazon are building around ambient computing in India. Alexa brings that power into the television sets that the customers use," he said.

Gupta cited the example of a consumer simply saying a movie or a TV series title to Alexa, after which the lights will dim, the curtains will fall and the television will directly go to that show/movie and even start playing it if the user has the requisite subscription.

"I'm not claiming that all of it is done, but there are a lot of pieces coming together and there's a lot more coming in," Gupta said.

Apart from smart TVs, Amazon's Fire TV device line-up includes a range of streaming sticks under the Fire TV Stick moniker and a streaming media player called Fire TV Cube.