SEATTLE - While often positioned as rivals, Best Buy and Amazon have teamed up together to design and sell new smart TVs embedded with Amazon’s Fire TV and integrated with the voice assistant Alexa.
Best Buy will be the exclusive retailer selling the TVs as part of a multiyear agreement that deepens the relationship between the two companies.
 
 

The Richfield-based retailer will roll out nearly a dozen 4K and HD Fire TV Edition models from Toshiba and Insignia, the latter of which is one of Best Buy’s private-label brands, starting this summer.
Best Buy will sell them in its stores and online in the U.S., and later from Canada. It also will become a third-party seller on Amazon.com as part of the deal.
While Best Buy and Amazon announced the deal Wednesday, the companies’ CEOs, Hubert Joly and Jeff Bezos, sat side by side talking about deal with a handful of reporters on Tuesday.
Bezos said they have been working closely together to make a “killer product.”
While Amazon and Best Buy both sell a lot of TVs online, he said consumers still like going to physical stores to make such purchases, a significant acknowledgment from one of the world’s richest men who has made much of his fortune from selling products online.
“Best Buy, with a very large physical footprint, lets people come into the stores and see the product, which is very important,” said Bezos. “People do want to come in and see the TV, they want to experiment with the TV, try it out.”
Joly said this is another example of Best Buy partnering with the world’s foremost technology companies to bring the best products to customers.
“This is not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, to quote Casablanca,” he said. “This is a beautiful friendship that started with the Kindle, and, of course, has evolved with Alexa.”
Best Buy began selling Amazon’s Kindle e-readers nearly a decade ago. It has since added other Amazon devices to its lineup including Fire tablets and TV sticks for streaming content. And in the last year, Best Buy has rolled out Amazon Alexa displays, as well as those for Google Home, to 700 stores to better explain how to link those devices to other household gadgets.
The Fire TV Edition models will allow users to access about 190 different streaming services and apps including Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video without having to connect it to an additional box or add-on. Consumers will also be able to use Alexa by speaking through the TV’s remote control or by linking it up to an Echo device to search for programs, see the weather forecast, or read lyrics while streaming songs.
In recent years, the TV industry has been moving more toward having operating systems embedded into the TVs themselves instead of relying on extra devices to provide access to streaming content, said Stephen Baker, an analyst with the NPD Group. While Apple TV has not yet been directly integrated into a TV, Roku has done it as has Sony, Samsung and LG.
“More and more what everybody wants is all of this stuff to be more seamless than it is today when you have so many choices out there,” he said. “Clearly, Amazon has been a leader in the bolt-on business with the Fire TV sticks and boxes, but they were behind a little bit in getting out to televisions.”