Amazon.com today introduced Fire TV, its entry in the increasingly crowded online video set-top box marketplace.
Fire TV is among the first boxes that supports voice search. The old way of dealing with scroll-and-click searching from an on-screen keyboard is replaced with a microphone on the remote that allows users to speak the title, actor, or genre and quickly find results.
Amazon.com is selling Fire TV for $99 — the same price as Apple TV — but considerably more expensive than Google’s Chromecast or entry-level Roku boxes.
Amazon’s box supports Certified Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and up to 1080p HDMI video. It offers access to Netflix, Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, WatchESPN, and many other TV Everywhere services (but not HBO Go). Fire TV is also a game console, with access to an online store selling more than 100 games at prices averaging $1.85 each.
“It has a powerful quad-core processor, dedicated GPU, 2 GB of memory, and dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi,” says Amazon. “With a fast, fluid interface, high definition 1080p video, and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound, Fire TV looks—and sounds—amazing. We also added an exclusive new feature called ASAP that predicts what movies and TV episodes you’ll want to watch and gets them ready to stream instantly. No one likes waiting for videos to buffer.”
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Gary Busey is featured in this humorous introductory advertisement for Amazon Fire TV. (1:00)
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Amazon elaborates further on its voice search feature for Fire TV in this video. (0:27)