Amazon is offering select Amazon Prime customers a...

Amazon is offering select Amazon Prime customers a free 30-day trial of Fire TV, said BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield, who was offered the trial in an email Thursday. Amazon is shipping the box gratis and customers who choose not to keep the product may return it at no cost. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to our request for information. Greenfield noted in a blog post that 30-day free trials are commonplace in the software/premium content space, citing similar promos offered by HBO and Showtime. Netflix has a similar promotion for new customers. In the technology hardware world, though, they're less common, said Greenfield, and he sees Amazon’s offer as a way to stimulate sales of IP-based TVs. The shift toward IP-based, on-demand, ad-free TV is primed to “notably accelerate over the next two years,” Greenfield said. Not only will it be more challenging for content providers in the linear TV model to break successful new live TV shows as the reach of IP-streaming devices expands, “but convincing consumers to endure 20 minutes of untargeted commercials will be infinitely harder,” he told us. Citing Google’s Chromecast for $35, Roku’s efforts to build its software directly into TVs and Amazon’s becoming more aggressive with Fire TV marketing, “We wonder if a price-cut heading into the 2014 holiday season will occur to drive penetration even faster,” Greenfield said.