This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Vega OS is finally here: On Tuesday, Amazon officially unveiled its new, custom-built Vega entertainment devices operating system with the launch of the Fire TV Stick 4K Select, a new streaming stick that comes with Vega preinstalled.
The Fire TV Stick 4K Select was announced alongside multiple new Fire TVs, which all still run Amazon’s forked version of Android. Supporting both platforms can be a headache for developers; I’m hearing that some major publishers have been hesitant to throw their support behind Vega for that very reason.
However, Amazon has a plan to ensure that the new 4K Select stick will launch with most of the apps customers expect from such hardware when it goes on sale later this month: It will simply run Android versions of popular apps that haven’t been ported to Vega yet in the cloud, and stream them to the Select stick.
“Select developers will have their existing apps cloud streamed while they develop a version of their app for Vega,” confirms Amazon spokesperson Melanie Garvey.
Amazon began publishing Vega OS docs for developers Tuesday. Most documents focus on bringing apps to Vega, which is Linux-based and uses React Native as its default app development framework. However, among the cache are also a few pages outlining the company’s plan B, which is officially known as the Amazon Cloud App Program.
“Amazon cloud app streaming allows the deployment of existing Fire TV apps to customers on Vega OS Fire TV devices,” one of those documents states. “If your app runs on a Fire TV Stick 4K Max and meets [certain prerequisites], it can run on a Vega OS Fire TV device using cloud app streaming.”
In essence, Amazon is going to publish small container apps for such cloud-streamed apps on the Fire TV app store, and then stream the actual app from its cloud servers within those container apps. Video content watched within those apps will be streamed directly to the device, so there won’t be any transcoding happening on Amazon’s servers. Consumers will be notified that the app in question is an “Amazon cloud-hosted app” when they browse the app store with their Fire TV 4K Select stick.
Amazon’s cloud app program is primarily meant for apps from major publishers — the kind of things customers would notice if they were amiss. The company is sweetening the deal by offering those publishers cloud streaming “free of charge for at least the first 9 months of operation,” according to that document. Publishers are encouraged to build a native Vega app during that time, and may be charged “a fee based on the number of monthly active users” eventually.
However, Amazon isn’t waiting around for publishers to enable cloud streaming. The company is proactively enabling cloud streaming for select popular Android apps whose publishers haven’t jumped on the Vega bandwagon yet, according to an FAQ document:
“How do I know if my app is enrolled in the Cloud App Program?
If you don’t already have your own Vega OS version for your app, look at the device support for your app in the Amazon developer portal. If your app shows support for a Vega OS Fire TV device, then it is being delivered via Amazon cloud app streaming.”
“These apps are enrolled when the developer’s app meets the requirements listed in our documentation,” confirms Garvey.
Cloud streaming of TV apps isn’t exactly new. ActiveVideo, a startup that was acquired by Charter and ARRIS a decade ago, used to use cloud streaming to bring internet video apps to underpowered cable TV set-top boxes. More recently, UK-based Synamedia launched a $10 dongle that relies entirely on cloud streaming.
Amazon isn’t a stranger to cloud streaming either: The company’s own Luna gaming service has been using cloud streaming to bring AAA video games to smart TVs and mobile devices. However, games running natively on Android-based Fire TVs are notably exempt from Amazon’s Vega OS cloud streaming program; the company said this week that Luna and Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass would become available on the Fire TV 4K Select stick soon after its launch.
The company’s official announcement of Vega OS this week came almost two years after I first reported about Vega’s existence, and also after Amazon launched three Echo devices running on Vega. However, Amazon has been releasing Android-based streaming hardware for over a decade now, and just this week disclosed that it has sold nearly 300 million Android-based Fire TV devices to date.
A lot of those devices are presumably still in use, meaning that publishers targeting Amazon’s customer base will have to support Android-based apps for the foreseeable future. Plus, with TV makers operating on multiyear hardware cycles, bringing Vega to TVs could end up being a drawn-out process.
Amazon acknowledged that balancing act in an FAQ this week, writing: “We’ve always been a multi-OS company. We have launched and will continue to launch new devices on Fire OS. … We continue to launch new features and devices on Fire OS and support existing experiences.”