Amazon bans Google’s Chromecast and Apple TV

Amazon is to stop selling devices from Apple and Google that compete with its own streaming media players, escalating the entertainment battle between the major tech companies. Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast are popular items in Amazon’s electronics store. But the devices are in a brawl for market share with Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, which were introduced in 2014. The Fire Stick delivers Amazon’s rapidly expanding video offerings to its customers. Apple TV and Chromecast do not.

Amazon’s move to ban competitors is not a retailing gambit. In fact, the company is willing to risk annoying customers who cannot get what they want because it is pursuing a much bigger prize. The stick is crucial to Amazon’s ambitions to move from being just a retailer to a multifaceted provider of everything virtual and physical.

“It’s unlike Amazon to be this territorial,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with the research firm Forrester. But he said it was a logical and perhaps inevitable move. Amazon Prime, which began as a frequent shipping service, now has tens of millions of subscribers. In the effort to build out its ecosystem, Prime’s video and music components are becoming as important as quick package delivery. Apple, Google and Amazon once made very different products. Apple made hardware like computers and smartphones, Google ran a Web search behemoth and Amazon was an online retailer. But the three companies’ business models are converging with a vengeance, with each offering a combination of hardware, like the competing video streaming devices, as well as software and entertainment like music and video.

“We’re seeing a turf war play out between Apple, Amazon and Google,” said Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies. Apple and Google declined to comment. Some analysts said there was one immediate loser here: customers. “It really just hurts the consumers and creates confusion at a time when all of these companies are trying to build up these products,” said Paul Verna, media analyst at eMarketer.