Amazon has added app support for Sony PlayStation 5 consoles for its fast-growing AVOD platform, IMDb TV (now Amazon Freevee). 

The distribution adds to previous device launches on Roku and Android TV and Google TV platforms, PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles, and Comcast Xfinity X1 and Flex CPE. IMDb TV is also supported by Apple iOS and Android mobile devices, and of course, the full line of Amazon Fire TV gadgets. 

Through the end of October, Sony had sold 13.4 million of its current-generation PlayStation 5 consoles worldwide. Proliferation of the platform has been impacted by the global chip shortage. 

Amazon doesn't release many user metrics for its three-year-old AVOD platform, but it did say in early May that IMDb TV viewership jumped 138% year-over-year. At that time, Amazon also said it had around 120 million monthly viewers for its over-the-top kingdom, which includes Amazon Prime Video and Twitch. 

IMDb TV is now a destination for original shows from Amazon Studios. For example, on Friday, the free-to-consumer streaming service will debut the second season of prep sports documentary Uninterrupted's Top Class: The Life and Times of the Sierra Canyon Trailblazers.

Finding little ways to get into the news cycle every day as it completes a SPAC-led IPO, Redbox announced Thursday that its fast-emerging streaming app is now supported by PlayStation 5, and soon, Sony's legacy PlayStation 4 video game console, as well.

Every platform counts for the Redbox app, as the company is planning an aggressive but late push into the ad-supported side of the Streaming Wars. Redbox's business plan is to serve “late-adopter” streaming consumers, many of whom are already signed up to the ranks of Redbox's 40 million-plus kiosk users.

Of course, if you‘re trying to appeal to consumers who may not be super-comfortable around IP technology — even basic stuff like streaming sticks and smart TVs — you probably don't want to complicate things further by not having your app supported by major platforms. 

Perusing Redbox‘s list of support OTT platforms reveals compatibility with Roku, Android TV, Chromecast and Apple TV, as well as Vizio, Samsung and LG on the proprietary smart TV OS side, and Xbox gaming consoles. 

Two weeks ago, Redbox announced support on Vewd-powered devices and smart TVs. 

There's support for iOS and Android mobile devices, too. 

Still pending, however: Support on one of the biggest platforms of all, Amazon Fire TV.

Also read: Redbox CEO Galen Smith: Why 40 Million ‘Late-Adopter’ Customers Will ‘Make the Digital Shift With Us’

“We have so much great content to discover, and we’re constantly adding more films and TV shows, as well as free TV channels. I know PlayStation 5 users will find something to enjoy on Redbox, which will soon be available on PlayStation 4 as well,” said Chris Yates, general manager of Redbox On Demand.

One week into a distribution spat that has seen YouTube TV app removed from the Roku Channel Store, Google seems to be moving on a little bit while Roku is caught in a major stock slide. 

Google's virtual MVPD, YouTube TV, has quietly added app support for Sony PlayStation 5 gaming consoles. (Tip of the hat to Android Police for noticing that the PS5, introduced late last year, has been added to the vMVPD’s robust list of supported devices.)

Roku, meanwhile, has seen his Nasdaq share price drop about 25% since word of the Google kerfuffle publicly emerged back on April 26. It’s share price dropped to under $280 Thursday after peaking at nearly $470 back in mid-February. 

Roku reports its first-quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon. 

Before finally touting the Roku distribution deal everyone had been waiting for, WarnerMedia on Wednesday also announced that its HBO Max app is now supported by Sony’s new PlayStation 5.

Also read: HBO Max, Roku Finally Reach Distribution Deal

The "Max" app upgrades the legacy HBO service into a broader streamed offering. It will soon include new-release theatrical film titles, including Wonder Woman 1984. The new HBO app is also now supported by the legacy PlayStation 4 console. 

Also read: HBO Max, Sling TV not Available on PlayStation 5?

With the integration into Sony’s PS4 and PS5 consoles, the latter of which debuted Nov. 12 with a $399 price, HBO Max is supported by all the major OTT platforms. This includes Amazon Fire TV devices; Apple products including the Apple TV 4K OTT player and iOS mobile gadgets; and Google products including Android TV devices and Android tablets and smart phones. Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, including the new Series X/S, and Samsung smart TVs also support HBO Max. 

Earlier this week, WarnerMedia announced that HBO Max has finally been integrated into the Xfinity X1 and Flex set-tops of America’s biggest pay TV operator, Comcast. 

The only remaining bogy on WarnerMedia’s radar was the biggest one of all, Roku. 

A deal with Roku finally came a month to the day (Nov. 16) in which Amazon and WarnerMedia broke a similar negotiating chasm, and brought HBO Max to the No. 2 OTT platform, Amazon Fire TV.

Also read: Sony PlayStation 5 Hits Stores Nov. 12 Starting at $399

Two weeks ago, Andy Forssell, executive VP and general manager of WarnerMedia's direct-to-consumer products, expressed confidence that ongoing talks between his company and Roku would result in HBO Max gaining entry onto a platform that runs more than half of U.S. connected TVs. “We'll get it done,” Forssell told investors. 

That Amazon deal brought an immediate customer boost for HBO Max, which ended the third quarter with only around 8.6 million of the 38 million total HBO subscribers having upgraded to the new “Max” service. John Stankey, CEO of WarnerMedia parent company AT&T, said last week that around 4 million users have signed up for HBO Max since the company’s Q3 earnings report, which was soon followed by the Fire TV integration. 

There is currently a big chunk of HBO subscribers who are stuck using the legacy HBO app on Roku. 

As for the PS5, it now supports all the major SVOD services. Sony, however, still hasn’t announced PS4 and PS5 support for Sling TV. 

This week, Sony and Microsoft are both launching their first completely new game consoles in seven years. Though the consoles promise to transform gaming for a new generation, that likely won’t happen for a while, given the relative dearth of hot new launch titles available this week. 

But the consoles do promise to also sell a lot of high-end monitors and solid-state storage drives, give streaming services potentially huge new distribution opportunities, and provide perhaps the first substantial reason for households to buy an even better 4K TV, capable of the kind of high-frame-rate smoothness that could tickle Peter Jackson’s most ambitious technical fancy. 

Those changes began Tuesday, with Xbox releasing its flagship Xbox Series X and low-cost Series S consoles, to be followed Thursday by two flavors of the PlayStation 5, with and without a disc drive. 

Also read: Microsoft to Debut Next-Gen Xbox Consoles Nov. 10

In some key ways, the consoles will be relatively similar: To deliver multiplayer games, online commerce, streaming video and internet connectivity, both will rely on Microsoft’s Azure cloud backbone (in a landmark deal between bitter rivals second perhaps only to Richard Nixon going to China). 

Both companies’ machines will offer app-based access to high-quality streams from big video and audio services such as Apple’s TV Plus, ViacomCBS’ Pluto, Fox’s Tubi, and Disney’s Hulu.

Both companies’ consoles will deliver much better video quality, up to 4K resolution with six times the refresh rate of a standard HD screen. The $300 Xbox Series S is something of an outlier: it costs less, has no hard drive, is far smaller physically, and maxes out at 1440K resolution, still good enough for tens of millions of TV screens in use today. 

But that refresh rate on the flagship consoles can look awesome, should you have the monitor or TV screen to actually showcase it. The problem: 4K screens designed to run games at up to 144 Hz, like LG's $1,400 CX TV, aren’t cheap, nor are they common. 

The same can be said of smaller desk-top monitors capable of those kinds of specs. A 27-inch, 4K monitor capable of up 144-Hz refresh rates typically runs around $1,000, which is hard to justify for all but the hardest-core PC gamers. With the new consoles, however, a number of manufacturers are jumping in with lower-cost, high-refresh-rate entries, and with 32-inch screens to boot, PC Gamer notes. 

Expect the new consoles, and games that push their specs, to help drive broader interest in high-end monitors that could affect all of entertainment.

Microsoft and Sony also tout their console’s use of expandable SSD storage to dramatically speed up the traditionally interminable process of starting up and changing scenes in huge games. Faster storage is not sexy, in any imaginable way, but for frequent gamers, it represents a substantial improvement in quality of life. 

The real differentiator between the two sides this time around, however, has less to do with specs and far more with sensibility. 

Sony is, perhaps understandably, sticking with the hit-driven exclusives that have made PlayStation the dominant game platform of the last quarter century.  Even where it’s sharing a title with PCs, Xboxes and other platforms, Sony often will secure an exclusive window or content to make the game a bit more its own. 

By contrast, Microsoft is finally embracing one area where it has competitive advantage: being the maker not just of the Xbox platform but also the software that runs thousands of PC-based games, including most of those used in esports competitions around the planet. 

The company’s Game Pass service—which provides cross-platform, free access to a huge library of good games for $15 a month—moves Xbox away from a hit-driven focus and more into the camp of games-as-a-service. Game Pass is a bargain for most gamers, and faces no equal (for now) on the PlayStation 5 side. 

More importantly, it updates Xbox for a cloud-gaming era where customers want to play a favored title on whatever device they have, wherever they may be, with friends who may be using different devices. 

For those less enamored with the cloud-service approach, several big game franchises are arriving this week, including Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creed (Valhalla), Activision Blizzard’s next Call of Duty (Black Ops Cold War), and a significant revamp of Bungie’s Destiny 2. 

But lots of other titles aren’t yet ready to launch. Microsoft won’t have the next version of Halo, which almost single-handedly made the original Xbox relevant to gamers two decades ago. It won’t arrive until next year, presumably in time to notably goose sales of this Xbox. 

And CD Projekt Red’s hotly awaited Cyberpunk 2077 has been pushed back to December, a victim of the challenges of creating a game for nine platforms, including the new and old consoles.  

More generally, it’s clear Microsoft has learned a few lessons since its disastrous launch of the predecessor Xbox One in 2013. 

For one thing, this time Microsoft has stripped away whiz-bang peripherals like the Kinect camera that could detect a player’s movements, mood and level of excitement. The tech was cool on the one hand, but also deeply creepy, and boosted the systems’ cost $100, making it uncompetitive with the PS4 in the decisive first months of that generation’s availability. Xbox One never recovered, selling about half as many units as the PlayStation 4 over the time since.

Microsoft has also updated a notoriously clunky interface, which should make it more useful for those trying to find their games, channels and other entertainment. 

The bigger challenge for would-be buyers may be finding PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S. Pre-sales quickly wiped available stocks, and now comes time to hunt for outlets that may have a few in store, though limited quantities will make that difficult. But even here, things are different from seven years ago. 

Rather than camp out in front of a Best Buy or Game Stop like in days of yore, you’ll be asked to order online, and pick it up when the retailer tells you to, under their pandemic safety protocols. So, maybe it’s a new generation of gaming in ways we never had to imagine before. 

HBO Max and Sling TV are notable omissions from a list of streaming apps published by Sony as being supported on its upcoming PlayStation 5 gaming console, which hits the market Nov. 12. 

A Sony blog post published Thursday said Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Hulu, Netflix, Peacock, Spotify, Twitch, and YouTube would be available when the PS5 launches.

Sony also published an image of the device’s remote, which has dedicated buttons for Netflix, YouTube, Disney Plus and Spotify.

Also read: Sony PlayStation 5 Hits Stores Nov. 12 Starting at $399

Notably omitted from the Sony announcement were AT&T/WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and Dish Network’s Sling TV, both of which are supported by the incumbent PS4 gaming platform. 

Somewhat strangely, The Verge quoted AT&T reps as saying that their niche SVOD service, Crunchyroll, will be available on the PlayStation app store for PS5.

A distribution impasse would only add to problems for HBO Max, which hasn’t been able to come to terms with the top connected TV device platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. 

AT&T said during its third-quarter earnings call this week that HBO Max is up to 28.7 million subscribers. 

PlayStation 5 debuts the same week as rival Microsoft debuts its Xbox X and S series products. 

The last refresh of the two biggest video game consoles occurred in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Like the new Xbox, PlayStation 5’s principal video streaming upgrades come in the form of screen resolution, with the device supporting 4K. 

And similarly, there will be a big upgrade in terms of computer horsepower, starting with an AMX Ryzen Zen 2 CPU, and AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based graphics engine, 16 gigs of RAM and an 825GB solid-state hard drive. 

The device includes an HD camera and a separately available remote for video streaming ($29.99)

They’re still debating whether the human eye can even perceive the improvement from 4K and 8K at screen sizes below 85 horizontal inches. And never mind that there’s still very little 4K content on the U.S. market, despite projections that 4K TV’s will be in 50% of U.S. homes by the end of the year.

But with the release of Sony’s next-generation PlayStation 5 video game console—which looks like it’s slated for sometime in 2020—the 8K era will officially dawn in North America, whether anyone gives a fork or not.

Speaking to Wired, the architect behind the upcoming console upgrade, Mark Cerny, described the major highlights of the upgrade, which include fancy new AMD chipsets and a solid state hard drive. Other hyped benefits include ray tracing—the processing-intensive capability of reproducing how light interacts with different objects and materials, which helps in creating ever-more-immersive gaming environments.

And then there’s 8K resolution capabilities.

The widely adopted HDTV standard offers about 2 million pixels on the screen in a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution format. A 4K display packs in about 8.3 million pixels at a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160.

As for 8K, it really brings the cow bell, with 33.2 million pixels crammed into the same screen area in a 7,680 x 4,320 resolution.

Research company Strategy Analytics thinks that around 500,000 8K TVs will be sold worldwide this year, and that 8% of U.S. homes will have these sets by 2025.

Content is another story.

“The availability of true 8K content is going to remain extremely restricted for some years,” noted Michael Goodman, director of TV and media strategies for Strategy Analystics. “Many content providers and distributors are still migrating to 4K from basic HD and will see little justification in investing in 8K when so few viewers will see any benefit for many years. Instead, they should focus on other important image enhancement technologies such as HDR (high dynamic range) and HFR (high frame rate).”

Regardless, interjecting the 8K discussion, however nascent, into one of the most important transoms into the American living room is interesting.

Sony disclosed in January that 91.6 million PlayStation 4 consoles had been sold worldwide since the console was introduced in 2013, making it the best-selling video game device in the world. In markets like the U.S., the PS4 is not just a video game console—it’s a key delivery agent for OTT services such as Netflix and Sony’s own PlayStation Vue lived-streaming service.

Will the PS5 usher in the 8K era in the U.S. before the 4K era even gets fully deployed?

As you can probably guess, there are lots of folks who doubt that, starting with gaming and digital entertainment and lifestyle pub Polygon. The blog wonders if Sony is really capable of packing in the necessary computer hardware to deliver things like 8K and ray tracing in a console that will be priced will under $1,000.

The blog notes that even top-of-the-line PCs have difficulty hitting 4K at a stable 60 frames per second.

And ray tracing? Polygon noted that Nvida has strived to enable real-time ray tracing with its new RTX line of graphics cards, targeted to high-end gamers and prices exceeding $1,000.

“The PS5’s GPU and CPU will be designed by AMD with ray tracing in mind from the beginning,” Polygon explained “But since most of the technology required to deliver 4K (let alone 8K) with ray tracing at playable frame rates isn’t available for consumers yet, it’s difficult to say just how well this might work in a console, or how powerful these chips will have to be.”