Amazon who sell their Kindle e reader tablets via Dick Smith is set to take on Apple and Google with a brand new TV adapter called Fire TV.
The Company believes that what they did in
the e-reader and tablet markets with its Kindle products they can do in the TV
market up against Google with their Chromecast and Apple with their Apple TV
box.
The e-commerce giant formally unveiled the
Amazon Fire TV – a tiny set-top smart TV adapter that is targeted to compete
not only against other set-top devices, like Chromecast, Roku 3 and Apple TV,
but some of the most advanced all-in-one smart TVs in the USA last night.
The Fire TV, which goes on sale in the USA
for $99.99 will be available in Australia via the Amazon web site claim Amazon
executives. The device is 1.7 centimetres thin and supports Wi-Fi it will
stream up to 1080p FullHD video to a TV via an HDMI connection.
Peter Larsen, Amazon Kindle VP, said the
Fire TV was designed for simplicity of use, while speeding up the smart-TV
content selection process by eliminating bottlenecks common to other platforms.
“We need to invent and simplify on behalf
of customers,” Larsen said. “We created an experience that uses state-of-the-art
power and performance in the service of simplicity.”
The Fire TV includes a quad-core processor
and Adreno 320 graphics engine that processes 57 billion floating point
instruction per second for three times the processing power of the Apple TV,
Chromecast and Roku 3, according to Amazon.
The architecture allows fast graphics
loading and fluidity.
The device streams up to FullHD 1080p with
Dolby Digital Plus Surround Sound.
The box will access Amazon’s own movie and
video-streaming services, including Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Prime
Video, as well as a large stable of popular competitive services: Netflix,
Flixster, Hulu Plus, Vevo, Showtime, YouTube, Crackle and WatchESPN, and music services Pandora, Amazon
MP3, TuneIn, iHeartRadio and more.
The company will continue to update and add
services over time, it said.
In addition, the box will offer an
extensive collection of affordable video games, including some developed by
Amazon’s own in-house studio, like “Sev Zero,” a third-person sci-fi shooter.
Among the third-party titles available will be such popular games as
“Minecraft.”
Games can be played with an optional US
$39.99 controller in most cases, with the supplied remote or a Fire TV app for
smartphones and tablets.
Amazon said the average cost of paid video
games on its platform is $1.85.
The remote includes a built-in mic to
support voice control to find and select entertainment content by spoken
commands.
The voice-control feature allows skipping
the hunt-and-click keyboard method employed by most other smart-TV adapters.
The Amazon Fire also packs a number of
exclusive services and features, including an ASAP feature that predicts the
shows a viewer will want to watch based
on viewing patterns and gets ready to stream them upon command.
