Amazon’s Fire TV platform has more active users than Roku’s smart TV platform, the e-commerce giant claimed Wednesday. Across all of its devices, Fire TV now has 34 million monthly active users, according to Amazon.
That’s about 5 million more that Roku, which ended Q1 of 2019 with 29.1 million monthly active accounts. The company also claimed that Fire TV remained the “#1 streaming media player family in the US, UK, Germany, India, and Japan.”
Fire TV had been benefitting from its close integration with Amazon’s Prime Video service, as well as its Alexa voice assistant. Each and every Fire TV device now ships with a voice remote with direct access to Alexa, and the company also began exploring far-field voice control for TV with the Fire TV Cube.
One sore spot for Fire TV users has been the integration of YouTube, which Amazon was forced to load with a TV-optimized browser after Google blocked a YouTube app on the device.
However, the two companies announced an agreement last month, which will result in the launch of an official YouTube app as well as apps for YouTube TV and YouTube Kids to the platform in the coming months.