Amazon Kindle Fire

Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Tablet will come pre-loaded with a number of media apps including Netflix and Hulu Plus for streaming videos, and Pandora for streaming music. But Amazon wants to make it clear that you can choose to download most of those apps on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet too… plus many others.

The Amazon Appstore has more than 19,000 apps and counting, making it one of the biggest alternatives to the official Google Android Market. So while Amazon would certainly like it if users would sign up for $79 per year Amazon Prime subscriptions to stream movies on their tablets, or purchase music or movies from Amazon MP3 or Amazon Instant Video, if you want to use Netflix or Rhapsody, you can do that.

The key difference is that Barnes & Noble’s tablets will come bundled with those media apps which means they’ll be available without any user intervention. Normally this is what I’d call bloatware, and I prefer Amazon’s strategy of allowing users the change to decide which apps to install. On the other hand, the move makes sense for Barnes & Noble, since it’s playing up the multimedia capabilities of the NOOK Tablet, but the company doesn’t have its own digital music or movie stores.

Amazon says apps that will be available for the Kindle Fire on day one include Facebook, Twitter, netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, comiXology, and The Weather Channel as well as games from EA, Gameloft, Popcap, Rovio, and Zynga.

Interestingly, the Netflix app for Android isn’t currently available in the Amazon Appstore, but today’s announcement suggests that it should be available soon — although I wonder if it might be available exclusively for the Kindle Fire. Existing Android phone or tablet users can download the Netflix app from the Android Market.

One area where Barnes & Noble might hold the edge is Hulu. There’s no Hulu Plus app available from Amazon’s store, and Hulu is currently the leading (legal) way to stream first run television shows the day after they air in the US.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

2 replies on “Amazon: Our tablet can run Netflix, Pandora too!”

  1. Netflix is a killer app for tablets.  Glad to see my preordered Kindle Fire will support it.

  2. Yeah, I haven’t seen or heard anywhere where Amazon is going to try and go all apple with their device and lock anything and everything out that is competition to them. Seems more like they are saying, ‘we feel we have the best services at the best price and know people will take advantage of them, and therefore don’t need to “lock in customers” as other companies need to do.’

Comments are closed.