It’s been almost four years since I last sat down with the person in charge of Amazon’s Fire TV. Back then, in 2022, the big questions were about prominence for the public service broadcasters and whether Amazon might ever stream live Freeview channels to its sticks. A lot has changed since.
Aidan Marcuss joined Amazon in January 2025 as Vice President of Fire TV, a role that puts him in charge of the whole thing end to end – hardware, software, partnerships, and the advertising that runs across Amazon’s devices.
He was in London recently, and I had the chance to talk to him about the topics that come up most often from Cord Busters readers: the shift to Vega OS, the app situation, Freely, and Alexa+.
If you’ve been following our coverage, you’ll know the backdrop. Every new Fire TV Stick will now run Vega OS, Amazon’s own operating system, rather than the Android-based Fire OS that powered the sticks for more than a decade.
That means no sideloading, and – for now – a much smaller app library. It’s been a divisive change, and I wanted to put some of that directly to the person responsible.
Vega OS And The Question Amazon Still Can’t Answer
The move to Vega has gone down badly with a particular group of long-time Fire TV fans – the people who chose Fire TV precisely because it was open, and who now feel that openness has been taken away.
A lot of people chose Fire TV over Roku and Apple TV because it was open. Were you surprised by the strength of the reaction when you announced Vega would be closed?
“Vega was an opportunity for us to continue to innovate and deliver more capabilities, even on the least expensive devices,” he said, pointing to the fact that the first Vega device was a 4K stick running on 1GB of RAM, which let Amazon hold the price down while still bringing Alexa+ and the rest of the modern streaming experience.
Building a platform that protected customer security and privacy, he added, was “sort of utmost in my mind.”
Security is the part Amazon leans on hardest as a justification for locking things down – so, given that the closed platform’s main practical effect is the end of sideloading, I asked whether there was actually evidence of users being harmed due to open, sideloaded devices.
“Apps that facilitate piracy, and other apps, can carry malware,” he said, adding that this “is not a Fire TV specific platform truth” and that there’s “a good amount of evidence that apps can carry unwanted code and behaviour on them when they’re sideloaded.”
All true in the abstract. But it’s noticeably broad for a question about Fire TV specifically, and it sidesteps the part everyone in the UK already knows: the pressure to close the platform has had at least as much to do with illegal IPTV streaming, dodgy boxes – and the very public campaign from Sky and the Premier League – as it has with malware.
Meanwhile, he also pointed to the sheer growth in things to watch on the Fire TV – free ad-supported clips, cloud gaming, and so on – as evidence that the catalogue available through the store on Vega OS has expanded dramatically. “I’m really happy with how customers are receiving the devices,” he said.
It’s a coherent pitch. But notice who it’s aimed at. Cheaper hardware for Amazon to build, a platform Amazon controls, security Amazon manages – these are reasons the switch makes sense for Amazon.
What I kept trying to get at, across the whole conversation, was the other side of that equation: what does a customer actually gain by choosing the closed device?
Then there’s the apps. This is the limitation that affects far more people than sideloading ever will. In the UK, the Fire TV 4K Select and the other Vega device currently offer around 3,000 apps, compared to around 40,000 on the Android-based Fire OS sticks.
All the big names are there – BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Netflix, Disney+ and the rest – but the breadth isn’t, at least not yet.
So I put the reader’s question to him as plainly as I could.
If a reader writes to me and asks, “Why should I buy this closed device with fewer apps, instead of the regular one?” – what do I tell them?
“The way we look at app counts can be deceiving,” he said. “No customer is actually downloading 50,000 apps. The question is whether the apps they want to watch, the content that they’re looking for, are there.” Looked at that way, he argued, customers can already stream “the vast, vast, vast majority of content” on Vega.
He also made the case that the gap is closing. App availability has grown since launch – VPN apps, absent on day one, are now available, which he offered as proof that the catalogue keeps maturing.
That’s a reasonable point about app counts – nobody installs fifty thousand apps. But it’s a defence of the downside, not a reason to choose the device.
By the end of our chat, I still didn’t have a clear answer to the question I really do get from readers. The honest version seems to be that you should buy the Vega stick because, increasingly, it’s the one that’s there.
And that’s worth being straight about. These aren’t bad devices. The hardware is fine, the interface is the same one you know, and the apps most people use are present.
The downsides are real but narrow: sideloading is gone, which matters enormously to a vocal minority and not at all to everyone else, and the app library is smaller, which IS a big deal today but will keep improving.
The bigger truth sitting underneath all of it is simpler. Within a few years, like it or not, the choice won’t be between a Vega Fire stick and an Android one. It’ll be between a Vega stick and no Fire TV stick at all.
The Cloud-App Window
One of the more practical worries we’ve raised before concerns the apps that haven’t been rebuilt for Vega.
To fill the gap, Amazon runs some of them from the cloud – and when it launched, that arrangement came with a catch: it was free to developers for around nine months, after which Amazon could start charging, raising the prospect of smaller apps quietly vanishing.
That window is roughly now, so I asked what happens when it closes.
What happens when those nine months are up – developers have to start paying, don’t they?
“There’s no timeout,” he said. “We’ll continue to make apps available.”
I pushed on the payment point, and he held the line without quite closing it: “There’s no timeout, and how we evolve that offering depends on where we are with apps, but there’s no plan to remove that service or remove those apps.”
Pressed again on whether apps might disappear in a few months, he said that would be a developer’s choice rather than Amazon’s, and that Amazon has “no intention” of pulling them.
That’s a slightly more open position than we’d heard before, and it’s reassuring as far as it goes. But it’s worth reading the wording carefully. “No timeout” and “no plan to remove” is not the same as a commitment to keep the service free for developers. So: encouraging, but not a guarantee.
Freely – And The Stick-Shaped Gap
The second topic Cord Busters’ readers raise constantly is Freely, the broadband-delivered successor to Freeview.
Live and linear TV is still hugely popular in the UK, and interest in Freely has been even stronger than I expected – especially since the first standalone Freely boxes arrived.
Here’s the thing, though. One of those boxes runs TiVo’s operating system, the other runs Android TV. Amazon sells Fire TV televisions with Freely built in – but Fire TV Sticks are out of this game entirely.
Does it bother you that there’s this popular, growing market – and Fire TV sticks are out of it, at least for now?
“I’m very proud of the Freely work that we’re doing on TVs,” he said. “Live and free to watch TV is very important to our customers here” – and not every TV manufacturer, he noted, delivers as integrated an experience.
But on the sticks, he wouldn’t be drawn: “I can’t commit to our plans about where we’ll extend it to or expand it to.”
He pointed instead to BBC iPlayer and ITVX already ranking among the top apps on Fire TV as evidence that customers can find the content they want regardless.
I tried a different angle – that Vega OS actually strengthens the case here, since Amazon now has more control over the operating system and could use a Freely-enabled stick as a proper selling point. Was that even on the table?
“I can’t commit to future product plans,” he said again.
Back in 2022, Amazon’s then-VP Daniel Rausch told me that streaming live Freeview channels to Fire TV sticks was “an interesting idea” worth taking back to the team.
Freely has since answered the “how” – there’s now a ready-made platform Amazon could simply carry, rather than building its own. The question has got easier in the four years since, but the answer hasn’t moved much.
But this is also where the conversation warmed up. Setting Freely aside, I asked about that Live tab – the section already on Fire TV devices that looks a little like Freely, pulling live channels into one guide.
It’s nearly there. Add the ability to scroll back and watch things on demand directly, add a few more niche channels, and it starts to do much of what Freely does.
Here, he was more forthcoming. “I’m glad you brought up the live tab,” he said, confirming Amazon is “always working on it”.
He mentioned that much of the Live TV development team is based in London, that he’d been in product reviews about improving “both live and Freely” on Amazon’s devices, and that there are “lots of plans to continue to improve it.”
He framed live TV as important to customers across Europe, not just the UK – something Amazon wants to get right everywhere and then tailor by country.
None of that is a commitment to a Freely stick. But it’s a clear signal and it suggests the Live tab on Fire TV sticks, at least, is somewhere Amazon is actively putting work.
Alexa+ And The Overpromise
I also wanted to ask about Alexa. Like a lot of households, we’ve got one in nearly every room – until this week, it was the original version, not the new Alexa+, and the relationship was, let’s say, occasionally fractious.
The original Alexa promised a lot at launch, and in the age of ChatGPT, the gap between what a voice assistant was supposed to be and what it actually did has only become more obvious.
So I asked whether enough work had now been done to close that gap with Alexa+.
On this, Marcuss leaned on the data. In places where Alexa+ has gone to general availability, he said, customers are using it “two and a half times as much as they were using classic” – and not just for the same old commands.
They’re asking more complicated questions, and asking them in more natural language. And that usage, he said, has held up over months rather than spiking and fading: “not just a flash in the pan.”
“I do think the promise is there now,” he said, before adding the obvious caveat that it’s early and Amazon intends to keep improving it.
Who Are The Recommendations Really For?
I finished on something that troubles many people, given the many hats Amazon wears. Amazon owns Alexa, the Fire TV, the app store, the advertising business, and a chunk of the content itself through MGM.
When Alexa+ or the home screen recommends something to watch, how does a viewer know it’s about what’s best for them – and not what’s best for Amazon and its advertisers?
His answer drew a clear line between two things. Anything sponsored, he said, is labelled as such: “those are sponsored, because they carry a label… that’s a very important signal for a customer to understand.”
Recommendations, separately, are “based on what we believe a customer will be interested in watching, period” – and Amazon will recommend anything integrated into its catalogue, whichever service it comes from.
A provider can choose to integrate or not; once they do, the recommendation engine is, by his account, indifferent to where the content lives.
Whether recommendations stay completely service-blind as Amazon’s own content ambitions grow is the kind of thing worth keeping an eye on – but on the question as put, the line he drew was at least a clear one.
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