Photo Credit: Hamed Taha
Amazon has officially made “tens of thousands of premium music videos” available to Fire TV users in the US with “no sign-ups, subscriptions, or fees required.”
The ecommerce giant, which has leaned into music in more ways than one during 2022, just recently announced the arrival of music videos on stateside Fire TV devices. Powered by 14-year-old music video platform XITE, the ad-supported offering is already live on the Amazon Music owner’s Fire TV televisions, sticks, and cubes.
Besides new releases from commercially prominent acts, Amazon’s music video platform allows users to access “a back catalog of classics from any genre,” according to higher-ups, who likewise indicated that “new content will be added daily.”
Additionally, Amazon noted that the free-to-use service features personalized recommendations as well as “200 expert-selected playlists” and enables viewers to “create their own mixes.” A cursory glance at the service shows that (seemingly uncensored) music videos begin playing immediately upon opening the app and continue playing as one navigates the platform.
The available media – including all manner of tracks that were created long before the era of music videos – has been categorized by genre, decade, popularity, and more. Lastly, Amazon Music Videos encompasses a seemingly robust filter option through which users can select the genre (or artist), decade, and style of music videos that they’d like to see.
2022, and particularly the year’s second half, has delivered several noteworthy developments on the music video side, and especially in terms of their availability on smart televisions.
Yesterday, ROXi, a smart-TV music video app, announced that it had added Simon Cowell as an investor and inked a distribution partnership agreement with Samsung. Currently available in the UK and Ireland, where execs say their service has reached “over one million” households, the roughly year-old ROXi has tapped Rockefeller to serve as its “exclusive financial advisor” ahead of a planned US debut sometime next year.
Meanwhile, Vevo added six channels to Hulu’s live package at December’s start, whereas Warner Music’s WMX artist-services unit (which itself debuted in November of 2021) closed 2022 by rolling out a trio of channels on Roku.
Like with Amazon Music Videos, viewers can access the latter three channels (WMX Pop, WMX Rock, and WMX Hip-Hop) for free and without signing up. But the featured media is rather heavily censored, and because the channels only broadcast live, users can’t select the exact videos they’d like to enjoy.