Amazon announces over 20 Fire TV-branded devices, including a new Fire TV Cube and an Anker-made soundbar, as the company seeks to compete with Roku and others
At the big European tech trade show, IFA 2019, Amazon today announced over 20 new Fire TV-branded devices …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's IFA 2019 splash is the scale-up moment in a Fire TV line it has been building since the 2015 refresh that added USB storage and pushed the TV stick into the UK and Germany. The headline move is breadth — over 20 devices in one drop — but the structural signal is the Anker-made soundbar: Amazon putting its brand and software inside a partner's hardware rather than shipping only first-party boxes.
That partner-hardware model is where the line goes next: by January 2020 Amazon had expanded Fire TV Edition into soundbars, car infotainment systems and set-top boxes, citing over 40 million monthly active users, and by 2023 it claimed over 200 million Fire TV devices sold alongside a cheaper TV lineup. The IFA announcement is the hinge between a gadget line and a licensable TV platform aimed squarely at Roku.
First-order effects
- Anker gets its audio hardware into Amazon's storefront and interface ecosystem under the Fire TV brand, while Roku faces a competitor fielding 20+ devices across price points at once rather than a single flagship.
Second-order effects
- The Anker soundbar sets a template other consumer-electronics makers can follow — ship your hardware with Fire TV inside — pushing Amazon's competition with Roku from the set-top box shelf into TVs, speakers and eventually cars, where Roku must decide whether to license its own OS more aggressively to keep pace.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming TV competition settles into an OS-licensing war where the winner is whoever's interface is embedded across the most device categories — the 40M-MAU-to-200M-device trajectory suggests installed base, not box sales, is the metric Amazon is optimizing for.
The trend: Streaming TV platforms are shifting from selling standalone boxes to licensing their operating systems into third-party soundbars, TVs and cars, with Amazon and Roku racing to own the embedded layer.