Amazon Strikes Deal with UK Broadcasters and Acquires Indian Rival Streaming Service; Temu Blocked in Indonesia

by Aimee Newell Tarín on 8th Oct 2024 in News

Today’s news: Amazon Strikes Deal with UK Broadcasters and Acquires Indian Rival Streaming Service; Temu Blocked in Indonesia to Protect Local Businesses

Amazon has announced a new deal with UK broadcasters BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, which will see their joint streaming service Freely integrated into the tech giant’s Fire TV platform. The service will be available on a range of smartTVs which use the Fire TV operating system. Meanwhile, Freely will become the main TV guide for Amazon smart TVs and others which have its Amazon Fire TV built-in. Freely – launched by the broadcasters’ venture, Everyone TV, back in April – contains around 70,000 hours of content.

Amazon is making moves in APAC too: it has completed another deal to acquire the assets of rival Indian streamer, MX Player. The financial details of the deal have not been made public yet, although it’s reportedly been closed at around £76m. The deal will see Amazon merge its free-streaming service Amazon MiniTV with MX Player to form Amazon MX Player. The new streaming service combines the libraries of both, and already boasts 250 million unique users in India. MX Player was launched in Korea back in 2011, originally as a media player for mobiles. It was then bought by Times India eight years later, who took the business in a different direction and switched its focus to streaming.

Elsewhere in APAC, Indonesia has blocked the Chinese e-commerce app Temu in a bid to protect local SMEs. Fiki Satari, Special Staff to the Minister for Creative Economy Empowerment at the Ministry, said in a statement: “This application from China allows direct transactions between factories in China and consumers in Indonesia, which has the potential to kill small businesses here.” Temu has unsuccessfully attempted to register its trademark in Indonesia three times since September 2022.