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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.
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