So Amazon was truly working on a console-slash-STB after all-- the online retailer turned hardware maker reveals a spearhead in the invasion of the world's living rooms with the Fire TV.
Rumours on the Amazon STB have been going on since April 2013, with Bloomberg first reporting of a Roku/Boxee-style device in development at the company's Lab126 hardware division.
The finished products looks like a small matte black box adorned with a simple Amazon logo. It runs on the latest version of Amazon's forked Android build (aka "Mojito") and carries a quad-core processor, Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB RAM and dual-band dual-antenna wifi. Pushing output are HDMI and optical audio ports.
Media content comes via Amazon's own Instant Video and Prime services, as well as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Pandora and iHeartRadio, among others. An interesting-sounding "ASAP" feature predicts the shows users are most likely to watch, pre-caching them for instant viewing.
An included Bluetooth remote and mobile device apps provides a familiar means of control, but Amazon insists it also has "voice search that actually works."
A further control alternative is the Fire Game Controller-- a self-explanatory gamepad similar in look to an offbrand Xbox controller. Games appear to make a big part of the Amazon living room plan, since the company is developing own games (at Amazon Game Studios) and forming partnerships with the likes of EA, Disney, Ubisoft, Sega and Mojang.
Will Amazon manage to provide customers with an experience superior to existing streaming STBs? Either way the Fire TV is available now, at least in the US.
