Bezos sheds light on why Amazon gave cold shoulder to Chromecast and Apple TV

Until now, the incident has been considered a simple case of a company trying to shun products that compete with its own offerings. However, in an interview at the Code Conference, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos hinted that his company was willing to continue to sell those streaming devices, provided that Google and Apple agreed to bundle Amazon’s Prime Video service with it.

Jeff Bezos was quoted saying that, “When we sell those devices, we want our player — our Prime Video player — to be on the device.”

Considering that Prime Video is an important aspect of its services business (a major revenue generator), it’s no surprise that Amazon is quite protective of it.

When questioned why Amazon didn’t develop an app for these two platforms, here’s what Jeff Bezos had to say: “You can always get the player on the device. The question is, can you get it on there with acceptable business terms?”

There’s a good chance that these “business terms” included the 30 percent cut Apple is known to take from third-party app developers. Giving out 30 percent of the revenue of your video streaming service doesn’t sound like a tempting deal after all. As for the Chromecast, Amazon probably sees it as a hard to one-up competitor to its Fire TV.

On the other hand, devices such as Roku, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Sony’s PlayStation line-up have been doing well on Amazon. In addition to being compatible with Amazon’s Prime Video, Microsoft, Sony, and Roku may not ask for significant revenue cuts.