If you need yet another sign that Apple is refocusing on pushing services to as many people as possible, look no further than the latest expansion of its existing partnership with Amazon which put Apple Music on Amazon’s Fire TV HDMI dongles.
This feature became available yesterday, CNBC reported.
To enable it, open the Alexa app on your phone and activate the Apple Music skill, which will require you to log in to your Apple account. If you’ve already set up the skill on your Echo, you don’t need to do it again for your Fire TV.
The integration permits Fire TV customers to ask the Alexa assistant to play tunes from their Apple Music account instead of from Amazon Music, Spotify or other streaming music services supported by the speaker.
Fire TV owners can ask Alexa to play songs from Apple Music with the usual commands, such as “Alexa, play music by Freddie Mercury on Apple Music”, “Alexa, play today’s hits on Apple Music”, “Alexa, play music by [artist] on Apple Music”, “Alexa, play [album name] on Apple Music” and so forth.
Echo owners in the United Kingdom can take advantage of this cool feature in the coming weeks, according to Amazon. Music videos and other videos from Apple Music are currently unavailable on Fire TV devices.
The Fire TV dongle was refreshed a few months ago with 4K video output, support for the superior Dolby Atmos sound and three major HDR standards, including Dolby Vision.
This welcome new feature is an extension of Apple’s existing partnership with the online retail giant that saw the company’s music-streaming service launching on Amazon’s Echo smart speakers late last year.
We saw first signs of a renewed partnership between the Cupertino tech giant and Amazon with the arrival of the Prime streaming service on Apple TV. As a result, Apple’s set-top box became, again, available on Amazon.com.
The online retail giant confirmed back in December that Alexa-enabled speakers from other manufactures would be allowed to integrate with Apple Music following the initial period of Echo exclusivity.
Apple Music even briefly appeared on Google’s Home family of smart speakers but was never active before it was pulled offline. Google attributed this to a bug and said there were no immediate plans to bring Apple Music integration to the Home speakers.
At CES 2019 in January, the Cupertino company said it would expand AirPlay 2 and HomeKit availability to third-party TV sets from the likes of Samsung, Sony, Vizio and other major vendors.
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