Amazon is launching its own line of TV sets as it continues to plant itself wherever the consumer is. Called the Amazon Fire TV Omni Series the affordable line of TVs will come in 43-, 50-, 55-, 65-, and 75-inch sizes with a starting price of $410.
Amazon has previously collaborated with other television makers to preload Fire operating systems on their devices, but this is the first time the tech and eCommerce giant is building its own large-scale display product.
Amazon is also adding support for the TikTok app to all Fire devices after successful rollouts in the U.K., Germany, and France.
Samsung smart TVs and Google TV both announced support for TikTok earlier this year, but the social media hub has yet to reach Roku, one of the leaders in the U.S. market share. Amazon Fire devices in Europe began offering the free app in July.
TikTok, meanwhile, has been working to make its content more palatable to TV viewers, including a new option for longer three-minute videos rather than the usual 60-second limit, as well as family-friendly viewing filters. The gradual pivot to TV and push into longer-form content resembles some of the steps that rival YouTube took as it grew into the behemoth it is today.
The announcement comes as a new report from App Annie shows TikTok has surpassed YouTube for the first time in average viewing time per user among consumers in the U.S. and U.K., a major milestone that speaks to how popular the ByteDance-owned video app has become during the pandemic. Still, with an estimated 700 million users to YouTube’s 2 billion, TikTok falls far short of YouTube in overall total watch time.
Amazon says its TikTok app will serve a continuous content feed without interruptions, much like the mobile app.
In addition to the new TVs and TikTok support, Amazon is adding new ways for Fire viewers to discover content, including the ability to ask Alexa for movie or TV show recommendations and engage Netflix’s random shuffle feature by voice.
“We’ve reimagined what a TV can do by building it with two of our most popular experiences at the core: the intelligent always-available power of far-field Alexa, and Fire TV’s content-forward approach to entertainment,” Daniel Rausch, VP of Amazon Entertainment Devices and Services, said in a statement.
