Fitness is a massive industry. Personal trainers, nutritionists, the venues themselves and much more make up a continuously growing market that people see value in. Health is major part of life, and tech companies have been plugging in their innovations for a number of years now. Health trackers and wearable technology like Fitbit and Apple watches, pairing these with smart scales has created an ideal data collection portal for companies to offer analysis. We’ve seen gaming enter the fitness realm with many innovations, most recently Nintendo’s ring fit has been a hot item and supply shortages during lockdown were definitely felt. Specialist equipment such as exercise bikes from Peloton have brought live streamed workouts into our homes.
Companies continue to roll out their spin on fitness technology and I’ve discussed how companies such as Google and Amazon are now focusing some resource on attaining some market share. Fitbit under Google have seen a new wave of releases and Amazon are pushing their health and wellness tracker, Halo. Recent news of a competitor exercise coming from Amazon sent Peloton’s share prices plummeting, for good reason. Many news outlets covered the announcement including Bloomberg. However, the “Prime Bike” from company Echelon fitness was later confirmed to not hold any connection to Amazon or its Prime products. The company removed details of their supposed collaboration and Amazon issued a statement to confirm.
Fitness for everyone is definitely something that would disrupt Peloton’s business. It was proposed to knock off almost two thirds of standard exercise bike but it seems that rumours were taken as news when the selloff happened. In other words, fake news caused major panic and Echelon Fitness have either been conned somewhere or tried to drive hype towards their own product in an underhanded manner. In my view, this is a case of the name says everything. The announcement of Halo sets Amazon up as prospective competitor in the fitness tech market. It is highly plausible that Amazon could debut an exercise bike at a significantly lower price point due to scaling ability. Perhaps plugging this into their Prime subscription service through a new division be (Prime Fitness) would be a real game changer. Online fitness is still emerging and it’s likely that we will continue to see bigger tech firms launch new fitness projects. But on this occasion, rumours and misinformation have caused quite a stir and for now, the Prime bike is not an Amazon project.
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