Continuing a thaw among the Silicon Valley giants in regard to over-the-top video distribution, Amazon’s IMDb TV streaming service is now supported by Chromecast with Google TV, as well as smart TVs running the new Google TV OS.
Support for other devices built on Google’s Android TV platform will arrive “in the coming weeks,” Amazon said in a Feb. 24 statement.
The news came just one week after Apple said its Apple TV app was supported by the Google TV OS.
As for Amazon’s free-to-consumer, ad-supported IMDb TV service, it already had intrinsic distribution on Amazon's Fire TV device ecosystem, as well as Roku and Microsoft Xbox gadgets.
Amazon hasn't released an active user metric for IMDb TV specifically, but it said recently that it has 55 million monthly active users across its ad-supported channels.
Amazon has been investing in its AVOD platform to the level of original shows. Notably, on Feb. 26 the service debuted Top Class: The Life and Times of the Sierra Canyon Trailblazers, a six-part docuseries focused on the high school basketball team of LeBron James’s son, Bronny.
Google TV is the successor to Android TV, overlaying advanced search and recommendation features. So far, several smart TV makers, including Sony, have signaled their intention to integrate the new OS into their 2021 TV set shipments. But the broader field of Android TV devices will take several years to switch over to Google TV.
Android TV and its successor remain niche factors in the overall connected TV market. For example, in a recent Conviva survey of what devices U.S. consumers used to stream the Super Bowl earlier this month, only 4% used Android TV/Google TV, with 1% using Google's legacy Chromecast OTT device.
