Overnight, Amazon announced the Fire TV Stick, a streaming media dongle that’s rather like a beefed-up Chromecast. Annoyingly, however, Amazon won’t ship the device to Australia.
The Fire TV Stick costs $US39, but if you try and ship one to an Australian address, Amazon politely refuses. Given that one of the key selling points for the device is easy integration with the Amazon Prime TV streaming service, which isn’t available to Australian customers, that isn’t entirely surprising.
While workarounds for importing it (such as purchasing in the US or buying on eBay) will doubtless emerge after it begins shipping on 19 November, I wouldn’t anticipate an official Australian release for a while, if ever.
Comments
6 responses to “Amazon’s New Chromecast Competitor Won’t Ship To Australia”
Funny they actively enforce region sales restrictions on their own hardware pre-orders, but not others until launch.
I find Amazon frustrating at the best of times. How many things can’t be sent to Australia is just crazy. I bought a hair trimmer from Amazon. I had to go through 8 suppliers before I found one that would ship to Australia. No surprises though … they weren’t the cheapest either, but it wasn’t available in Australia.
I now search DX or AliBaba before I bother with Amazon.
Here’s a simple way to find the items actually sold directly by Amazon, which will always be shipped to Australia, cheap, cheap too! e.g. $14 shipping for Skateboard deck, $8 for a pair of impact protection shorts – CrAzY! Anyways, just do your search on Amazon for the item you’re after, then add the following to the end of the search results URL in the browser and load (press enter):
“&emi=ATVPDKIKX0DER” (without the quotation marks)
This will reload the search, but only returning items sold by Amazon directly, and all of which will ship to Australia. 🙂 They won’t sell everything, but I have good success with buying this way and getting cheap, 10-14 day shipping to Aus.
shipito.com But unless this does something that the chromecast won’t, it’s still going to cost over $50 to get one out here, might as well just get a chromecast.
Shame, the remote makes it perfect as a cheap Plex streamer. I know the Chromecast can do this but using a phone as a remote can be fiddly.
Recently compared the Roku 3 to the full Amazon Fire TV box. While the Amazon one is technically better – the hoops you have to jump through to get it here make the Roku a no brainer.