Well, to be fair Amazon will offer you a BJ if you ask for one, but 90% of the time it’s the Amazon seller getting forced to their knees.
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Did I hit the nail on the head yesterday?
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Whose to say that they don’t have a bigger plan in place and may have an official integration with SmartThings soon?
With the whole Boston Tea Party yesterday with Blinks thrown in the water with instantaneous panic running amuck, people couldn’t even wait 24 hours to see why this was occurring without gaskets being blown 
Based on Amazon’s track record, I’m more pessimistic. Samsung is another Google in their eyes.
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“If you own one of our systems, nothing changes for now.”
Ahem… Something’s changed… liars.
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Yup.
Anyone remember Revolv?
NOTHING IS CHANGING… NOTHING IS CHANGING… NOTHING IS CHANGING…
(your $300 hub is now a brick).
Very interesting. Seems Amazon is looking to make even bigger waves in Home Automation in 2018 (as silly as that sounds!). Obviously they have their Echo products, but this is their first big move at trying to create a Home Automation eco-system.
I said yesterday that Blink needed luck if their plan was to take on Samsung at their own game - this is exactly the sort of luck they need.
You can kiss goodbye to any sort of integration with SmartThings now!
Echo integrates with ST. This news may persuade me to give Blink another chance.
One possibility is that Blink video may be available on Fire TV in the future.
As open as Amazon generally is, I have to think ST integration will return.
Any company (Regardless of Amazon’s ownership) can already develop a skill to do that. My Ring Pro already does it.
“Alexa, show the front porch” —> A live view of my doorbell cam displays on the TV (FireTV) that’s paired with my Echo Dot.
I think it’s more the other way round personally i.e. Samsung created a skill for the Echo.
Not sure whether Amazon will allow that this time round given that it will be a direct competitor. Happy to be proven wrong though.
As for Blink showing up on Fire TV - great. I’d much rather prefer it hooked up to my entire hub though. Opens so many more doors.
Hell…here in the UK we don’t even have the ability to control the Fire TV from the Echo yet!
I see this as more a shot at Google/Nest than Samsung.
Amazon needed ST and Wink integration to get the early foothold and develop the product more while they gained as much market share as possible… Now they’ve released their own Echo ‘hub’, now why do you think they’d do that?.. because the next step is to cut everyone off and push their own hub now that it’s ready, and since everyone already owns an echo, they probably won’t switch to a competitor.
Amazon has a history of not playing nicely with others. Amazon has a history of trying to force their own ecosystem…
I’m not optimistic about the future for Echo.
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Amazon needs to support z-wave technology if they want to get into the smart home business and be successful. Their new Echo hub only supports zigbee I thought.
Sure but then they’d have to license Z-Wave and Amazon don’t play well remember, plus, the majority of things that Z-Wave can do, ZigBee can too and if that’s all the unaware masses need to be happy then guess what…
Their Echo hub has awful software and is gimped with only a ZigBee radio. They still have to fight Apple and Google so I don’t think they’re going to have the leverage or luxury to be able to cut everyone off.
I guess we’ll see…
Yep, that’s all we can do and hope for the best. I can say one thing without any doubt, however - Amazon buying Blink IS good for Blink and their products.
I guess we know why Blink decided to block the RBoy integration now that they announced they sold out to Amazon.