In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the people behind Ministry of Sound explain how they leveraged Amazon’s digital and physical distribution opportunities to monetize across business units and provide valuable insights into the process of developing an app for Fire TV.

Ministry of Sound is a global media and entertainment company with an impressive range of interrelated business units. In addition to their famed London club featuring dance and house music, Ministry of Sound combines one of the world’s largest independent labels with a tour and events business, a digital radio and video streaming presence and an apparel business.  Amazon facilitates sales of both physical and digital services for Ministry of Sound, meaning that they can sell physical copies of albums as well as promote their radio app all with one partner. 

With Amazon Fire TV, Ministry of Sound enables customers to experience their famed London club live through their home entertainment system.  Amazon Fire TV offers an exciting opportunity for app developers to reach more customers, by making apps and games accessible in the living room. Amazon Fire TV is a tiny box with huge specs. It has 3x the processing power of Roku and Apple TV, a fast quad-core processor, 2 GB of memory, dedicated GPU, Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and optical audio out. Fire TV Stick, now available to customers in the UK, Germany and Austria, is the most powerful streaming stick available, with 4x the storage and 2x the memory of Chromecast, plus a dual-core processor and 1 GB of memory. To learn more about Fire TV, click here.

When Ministry of Sound first learned about Fire TV, they had six weeks for development until launch. It sounds like pretty tight timing, but since Fire TV supports HTML5, Ministry of Sound was able to utilize their existing web applications for quick publication on the device. “Development was easy for Fire TV actually, even working with remote app developers”, says James Garside, App Product Manager at Ministry of Sound. James also gives an advice for other Fire TV developers: “Utilize the hardware of the living room” to deliver high quality audio and video streams and “really immerse the user into the experience.”

Check out all three Ministry of Sound videos to find out more about how Ministry of Sound leveraged the diverse capabilities and business lines of Amazon, how the unique experience for both Ministry of Sound and Amazon customers was created through Fire TV, and the process to build the app for Fire TV.

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