Best Buy to Sell TV's that has Amazon TV Fire Included

In its quest to get more consumers to use its Fire TV products, Amazon announced an unusual partnership Wednesday: The company has teamed up with Best Buy to sell 11 TV sets powered by Amazon’s Fire smart TV operating system this year.

“We’re super excited about this partnership,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said during a media briefing with a handful of reporters in a Best Buy store near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters Tuesday.

As part of this multi-year partnership, Best Buy is becoming the exclusive retail partner to sell Fire TV Edition TVs, as these devices are officially called, made by Toshiba as well as Best Buy’s own house brand, Insignia. Best Buy will also sell the TV sets on its own website, and will for the first time in its history become an official Amazon seller and offer the devices through Amazon.com

Fire TV Edition TVs offer essentially the same user interface and apps as Amazon’s existing Fire TV streaming devices, with the addition of a few TV-specific features. This includes a live TV guide with program information for over-the-air broadcast channels as well as picture-in-picture-like previews of any connected devices, be it a Blu-ray player or a game console.

Wednesday’s announcement was short on some key technical details. We don’t know yet which display sizes the TV sets will have, or for how much they are going to sell. The 11 models that are going to ship this year will include both 4-K and HD TVs , which suggests that at least some of them will be on the more affordable side. Both companies said that they will start selling some TVs this summer, and announce additional details in time.

However, even without those details, the announcement is significant. For one thing, it demonstrates Amazon’s continued foray into the home, where it is already present with its own Fire TV streaming devices as well as tens of millions of Amazon Echo smart speakers.

But beyond that, the partnership between the e-commerce giant and the retail chain also shows Amazon’s increased ambitions to show off its products in physical retail locations, and its willingness to partner with perceived arch rivals to do so

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