Amazon.com is on Fire!

Amazon.com is on Fire, literally and figuratively.

The trend has been to consume TV shows, blockbuster movies and music – over the internet – where access to decent broadband and a HDTV is not a problem. After all, who wants to rely on the good-old TV stations’ schedule to enjoy their favourite movie/show or go through the trouble of downloading pirated content like those juveniles? As of today, there are a wide variety of streaming boxes scrambling to satisfy your audio-visual indulgence: Roku 3, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, WD TV and a whole armada of smart TVs in between.

Amazon has joined the bandwagon by releasing its very own media streaming box named Amazon Fire TV. Amazon has turned-up the heat on the competition by offering a hardware with high technical specifications all in a nifty little frame. According to Amazon:

It has a powerful quad-core processor, dedicated GPU, 2 GB of memory, and dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi. With a fast, fluid interface, high-definition 1080p video, and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound.

Amazon Fire TV can:

• offer Voice Search for finding content across the various services it supports
• tangle with the following services and more: Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, Crackle, YouTube, HBO GO, Showtime Anytime, WatchESPN, Bloomberg TV, Vevo, Pandora
• offer you over 100 games, and according to them, thousands of other games are coming
• mirror content from your Kindle Fire HDX tablet to your HDTV
• cook your dinner

Content-wise, Amazon Fire TV is squarely targeted at residents of the USA but where there’s a will, there’s always a way… Amazon.com offers a comparison table staking their device with the leading competitors. I have to get my hands on one of these to know how it really compares with Roku 3.