Amazon's first-ever smart TVs will provide leverage in both the CTV space and TV measurement

The news: Amazon’s first-ever smart TVs, the Fire TV Omni Series, will propel the company to disruptor status in both the CTV and TV measurement spaces.

• Two models will be available in October: the Fire TV 4-Series beginning at $369.99, and the Fire TV Omni Series beginning at $409.99.
• The Fire TV Omni Series will connect to existing Amazon smart home technologies like Alexa and Ring, a major selling point for existing Amazon customers.

The CTV opportunity: Amazon’s Fire TV products have already made a mark in the CTV space, and CTV adoption as a whole is on the rise.

• Used by 85.5 million people in the US, we estimate, Fire TV is the No. 3 most-used CTV product behind general smart TVs and Roku. Connectivity with existing Amazon services and smart home products will help propel it to become an even larger player.
• CTVs aren’t the future anymore; they’re the norm. We estimate that 82.9% of US households will have a CTV in 2021, and 87.0% will own one by 2025.
• Amazon didn’t need to make actual TVs to compete with CTV manufacturers. We expect that Amazon’s Fire TV products will reach 30.3% of the US population—or 45.3% of all CTV users—by 2025.

But it’s not just about selling TV sets: Going beyond consumers, the opportunity in measurement is also significant.

• Nielsen’s Media Rating Council accreditation troubles and growing calls for more flexible, customizable measurement standards have created space for several new competitors to emerge across both linear and digital TV.
• Among those competitors are Roku and Amazon, who have flexed their large customer bases to advertisers by creating free, ad-supported channels on their platforms.
• Smart TV manufacturers like Samsung and LG have already made an imprint in measurement by selling their large troves of anonymized, automatic content recognition (ACR) data to advertisers.

The leg up for Amazon is exclusivity: Amazon is the gatekeeper to a city-sized walled garden of data that includes not just viewership metrics, but also online shopping habits, Alexa data, and more.

• By holding these insights close to its chest, Amazon can attract major advertising partners who will have exclusive access to a wealth of user data.