• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 2, 2014

Amazon’s Fire TV, a brand new product aimed at the over-the-top (OTT) TV market, already has a number of big content providers lined up, including digital audio platforms like Clear Channel Media and Entertainment’s iHeartRadio service.
 
The digital radio service, which is also one of the first apps available on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, offers customers with Amazon Fire TV access to live audio streams from over 1,500 broadcast radio stations and curated digital-only stations.

It also gives them the ability to create their own customized stations drawing on Clear Channel’s library of over 450,000 artists and 18 million songs.
 
This is just the latest in a series of new digital device and platform integrations for iHeartRadio, which has also partnered with Apple’s CarPlay, the Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch, AT&T Drive, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia and Volvo.
 
Nor is it iHeartRadio’s first integration with TV via digital adjuncts. In 2011, CCME announced that iHeartRadio would be available to members of Xbox Live Gold, Xbox’s online entertainment service.
 
The launch of Amazon’s Fire TV promises to shake up an already volatile OTT marketplace. OTT refers to any TV equipped with digital capabilities to access content not already offered by network operators, including TiVo and other DVR devices, game consoles, Roku devices, Apple TV, some IPTVs, and now Amazon Fire TV, among other options.
 
The digital audio marketplace is also heating up, as relatively new entrants like Apple’s iTunes Radio compete with pioneering players like Pandora. According to the latest figures from Edison Research and Triton Digital, published in the annual “Infinite Dial” report in March, 31% of American adults ages 12+ said they listened to Pandora in the last month, while Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio got 9%, Apple’s new iTunes Radio 8%, and Spotify 6%.

On the advertising front, 75% of respondents who listen to online radio on a weekly basis said commercials are a fair price to pay for free programming, roughly comparable to 80% for weekly AM/FM listeners.