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As a popular Irish drink manufacturer once said: ‘Good things come to those who wait’. More than two years after negotiations begun, Apple TV has signed a deal to bring Amazon Prime Video to its screens. With Apple TV in need of a decent streaming service and Amazon Prime on the hunt for a host for its popular service, the deal makes perfect sense for all involved. However, tensions between the technology rivals delayed the deal for more than two years, after Amazon stopped selling Apple TVs on its retail site.
The reality is that everyone loses out when rivalries get in the way of common sense. As market analyst Paul Verna, from eMarketer, said: “Whenever these companies try to freeze each other out, everybody suffers. Ultimately the consumer always loses, when deals like this are held up."
But with Apple announcing its HomePod smart speaker yesterday, the future between Apple and Amazon products working together is integral, especially to the flourishing IoT market. As Michael Mulquin of the British Standard Institute explained, the tech giants of Silicon Valley must put their differences aside for the future of technological innovation. “In the future Google products must be compatible with Apple products and Amazon products must be compatible with the latest startup’s homemade device. There is no point having all these connected devices if they cannot work with one another.
“Standards are boring but they are very, very useful. If you want to really open up a smart city, then it needs to be decided on what needs standards and what doesn’t. Standards within the smart city sphere are in the early stages but they will make everything more efficient for users in the long run.”
Keven Dickerson, ETSI board member said that in the future everything needs to be connected in order to provide the customer with a greater service overall. “The smart city needs different smart elements to work together: the home, healthcare, shopping, transport and the office all need to be connected to one another. At the moment these are all seen as separate, disconnected smart spheres. Now it is about connecting them to each other. Everything from phones working with TVs and smart speakers to Apps being compatible with all OS systems needs to be put in place. There is no room for exclusivity in the future market.”
