Apple TV outsold by Amazon's Fire TV in 2014, now the fourth most popular streaming device
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Context & Ripple Effects
By the research firm's count, 2014 was the year Apple lost the U.S. streaming box race it once led: Fire TV outsold Apple TV, dropping Apple to fourth behind Roku, Google and Amazon. The Quartz review that fall framed the stakes — the new Apple TV was rated best for iOS users, but Amazon's Fire TV won on interface and streaming quality for everyone else.
The gap only widened from there. Two years later, Roku held 37% of the U.S. player market with Fire TV at 24% and Apple TV down to 15% — a slide that pushed Apple toward software rather than hardware answers, like the overhauled TV app with Channels shipped on iOS 12.3.
First-order effects
- Apple enters the fall selling season as the No. 4 streaming device maker in its home market, behind three rivals whose devices undercut it or attach to cheaper price points.
- Amazon can claim momentum over Apple in living-room hardware just as it positions Fire TV as a storefront for video content and services.
Second-order effects
- Roku, already the volume leader, gets validation of its neutral-aggregator position while Google's Chromecast holds second place — pressuring Apple to compete on ecosystem lock-in instead of unit share, per the iOS-first framing reviewers gave the new box.
- Content owners and app developers now see four viable U.S. platforms rather than an Apple-centric one, spreading bargaining power across Roku, Amazon and Google.
Third-order effects
- If cheap sticks and boxes keep winning share, the endpoint is what later data showed: the device itself commoditizes into the smart TVs that surpassed streaming players in broadband households by Q1 2020, leaving platform owners to fight over apps, accounts and ad inventory rather than hardware.
- For Apple specifically, the pattern points to treating the TV as a services surface — Channels, recommendations, the TV app — rather than a must-own box, accepting fourth place in units to keep iPhone users inside its video stack.
The trend: U.S. streaming TV is consolidating around low-priced Roku, Amazon and Google devices with smart TVs absorbing the rest, forcing premium-priced Apple to pivot from hardware share to software and services.