Eric Ravenscraft
Best Buy is already the best place to window show for the TV you’re eventually going to go buy on Amazon anyway. Now the companies want to team up to sell Amazon televisions inside Best Buy stores.
Today, Amazon and Best Buy announced a joint partnership to sell televisions from Amazon—manufactured by Toshiba and Insignia, and running the Fire TV platform—inside Best Buy stores. Amazon only just started selling televisions with Fire TV built in last year, but if you wanted to buy one, you had to order it from Amazon online, which isn’t the best way to buy a TV. Now you’ll at least get to see them in person before you commit.
It’s worth pointing out that in our roundups of streaming platforms, we rarely recommend Fire TV to begin with unless you’re really into the Amazon ecosystem. While it excels at surfacing Prime movies and TV shows (which makes sense from Amazon’s perspective), and it does include Alexa, it lacks a lot of features and flexibility of other smart TV platforms. Then again, we don’t really like TVs that come with smart software included to begin with, so there’s always the option of picking up a different set-top box if you don’t like what came in your TV. Regardless of which platform you prefer, at least Best Buy is finally signing off on your Amazon window shopping.
Source: BusinessWire via CNBC
