2014-05-07, 20:22
(2014-05-07, 20:13)lartomar2002 Wrote: I do not think Amazon will ever support XBMC on the Fire because they can not generate any revenue from it. Just the opposite, they will lose revenue because most people will use XBMC rather than rent or buy videos from their site. Also they will lose what ever moneys they get from Netflix when someone rents a video.
So why do they allow developers to submit free apps? Why do they even offer a "free app of the day" program? Because even if Amazon isn't directly making money from an app, more apps make the devices more useful, and therefore more appealing to customers. The more that customers use the device, the more likely they are to use Amazon's services.
XBMC fills the same role as Plex, which is fine software but a lot of people aren't going to want to pay $5 for an app that requires them to also install Plex Media Server on another computer before they can really use it. So that leaves a lot of customers either not interested in the Fire TV since it otherwise can't play local media, or else sideloading XBMC. I'm hoping that Amazon will see the wisdom in putting a launcher for XBMC in the Fire TV's App menu, considering the alternative is exactly what a lot of people have been discussing in this thread: using other side-loaded apps like Llama to bypass the Fire TV interface entirely.
