Amazon Fire TV: Is This the Future?

Amazon Fire TV: Is This the Future?
Long live video? Rest in peace television? Not yet at least; this was the message that was hidden in Amazon’s launch of its highly anticipated TV set-top box set, which has been introduced at a time when the whole concept of television is up for grabs. It will not be very difficult for fans of video to get what they desire as long as Big Telecom and Big Content continue to exist in their current forms. They will have all the freedom they want for discovering and watching moving pictures whenever the whim strikes. However, these two companies tend to move glacially.

Until they do, Amazon Fire TV is seen as a huge step forward. This TV shares the same price tag as that of Apple TV of $99, which is twice expensive as a Roku and three times the price of Chromecast. However, the Fire TV has three notable aspects that enable it to go beyond the ubiquitous emphasis on its user-friendliness, which comes from the Apple era and gives people a window into the future of the living room. First and foremost, this TV from Amazon has the capabilities of doing voice searches. People have to speak into the Fire remote and the TV will search for what users are after.

This is something that devices from Roku, Apple and Google haven’t been able to manage up till now. Sony has promised to come up with this feature soon and is already available to those Microsoft users who watch TV on their Xbox. It doesn’t seem that far away that people will be screaming at the walls and they will even have eyes. Nonetheless, Amazon seems to be the first one to have ventured into this territory. The second aspect is the 2GB of storage provided, which may be matched by the competitors quickly and easily, but should also have the desired quality.

The third aspect that should definitely be noted in regard of the Amazon Fire TV is that of gaming. This is derived from the software heritage of the new device; the Android operating system. However, this OS, as in the case of the Kindle Fire e-reader, has been tweaked by Amazon beyond recognition from the freely available operating system of Google Inc. Nevertheless, zero threat is posed by Amazon Fire TV to the super-powerful video gaming consoles that have been launched by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Even dedicated PC games don’t have to be threatened by the TV as it is designed to be good enough for those individuals who are interested in having a little bit of fun from time to time rather than playing games on a regular basis. Furthermore, Amazon has also claimed that its Fire TV is part of an open ecosystem just because it is based on Google’s Android OS. This may not be the case necessarily as Amazon is said to be one of the leaders of the lockdown media world and has a copyright paranoia of platform providers and publishers.

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