Last week, a 293-page filing leaked from the Competition Commission of India suggested that Google and Amazon were once again at odds, with the former intimidating its Android partners from making devices, mostly smart TVs, powered by Amazon's Fire TV operating system.
But as the tech and streaming businesses pondered the implications of a renewed tech battle between Amazon and Google, it appears the kerfuffle had already been resolved.
On Thursday, Chinese smart TV maker TCL announced a new line of QLED smart TVs, earmarked for Europe this fall, powered by Amazon Fire TV. TCL was one of the manufacturers identified in the Competition Commission report as being warned by Google not to use Amazon Fire TV if it still wanted to also license Google's Android TV OS. (Our sibling pub, TechRadar, has a pretty good overview of these new TCL sets here.)
Technology news publication Protocol reported, also on Thursday, that an agreement was made "in recent months" between Google and Amazon that enabled the latter to license its Fire TV OS to not only TCL, but other companies mentioned in the report, such as Hisense and Xiaomi. (Notably, those two companies have already announced their own Fire TV smart TV models.)
Asked about the report by Indian regulators during a product briefing attended by Protocol Thursday, Daniel Rausch, Amazon VP of entertainment devices, said, "Its findings speak for themselves." He didn't comment further on the matter.
TCL announced amid the Consumer Electronics Show in January that it was shipping 10 million smart TVs each year powered by Google's Android TV, or its "Google TV" successor brand.
In the U.S., TCL is also a major supplier of TVs powered by Roku. It had been restricted from licensing Amazon Fire TV based on years-old rules Google plied to Android TV licensing partners under what is known as the "Android Compatibility Commitment" (ACC), restricting licensors from using "forked" versions of Android software.
At its source code, Fire TV is based on Android, and is thus defined as a forked iteration of the product.
Resolving this issue will have major benefits for Amazon at a time during which gateway OS control of the European streaming market is very much up for grabs.
As Protocol's always-dialed-in Janko Roettgers noted, Google benefits, too, as it would seem to ease the antitrust pressures Google is getting from regulators worldwide regarding Android's market dominance. (There remains some doubt, however, that one agreement will solve that global issue for Google.)
There's also the matter of TCL's smart phone business -- restricting the company from Android TV would also restrict Google's software from the devices of a key mobile manufacturer.
In the Indian regulatory report, Amazon executives -- going on the offensive -- described the impacts of the ACC (formerly known as the "Anti-Fragmentation Agreement"): "In several cases, the [smart TV original equipment manufacturer (OEM)] has indicated that it cannot work with Amazon despite a professed desire to do so in connection with smart TVs. In others, the OEM has tried and failed to obtain 'permission' from Google."
In a statement to Protocol, Google continued to defend its Android rules, despite the recent agreement with Amazon:
"Our focus as a platform is to provide consistent and secure software experiences to users and developers, across our ecosystem of partner devices. If a device is incompatible, we cannot guarantee that the apps on Android will work reliably, which could put user security at risk." ■
