Amazon just announced that they were stepping into the streaming box competition with Amazon Fire TV. It's available today for $99 and can also play games using the remote, or you can buy a controller for $40. It looks neat, but there's quite a bit keeping me from buying it. I'll just run down a few thoughts in this article.
Price
I was watching the CNet editors discuss this while the info came in since there was no video allowed in the event. When they were speculating the price, they were thinking it could be $30, $50, or included with an Amazon Prime membership with them heavily leaning towards the latter after they announced the game controller would be $40. When they announced it was going to be $99, I was surprised. Amazon says it's "Premium content at a non-premium price", yet that's the exact opposite. Let's not forget that there's not a HDMI cable included, so that's going to be at least $5 more. The cheapest option on the market is the Chromecast for $35, and in a week or two Roku is coming out with their own streaming stick for $50 which will essentially be a Roku 3 without gaming (early reviews say there's long load times though). Sometime this year Apple is going to announce a new streaming box, and I imagine it'll be in the price range of Chromecast and the Roku Stick. Amazon made a terrible decision to make the price that high with all this new stuff coming out. In my opinion, it should have been $50 for the box or $90 for the box and controller. That would be much more appealing to buyers.
No HBO GO
I can see this being a deal breaker for a lot of people. Considering how much cable companies charge a month for DVRs, many would rather spend the money on a subscription to a premium channel and use the apps the channels have. Plus, HBO GO has quite a bit of movies on there, so instead of waiting for it to air on TV they can just start up the app. Over 30 million people subscribe to HBO, it's a pretty big deal for Amazon not to support it on the Fire, especially when they have Showtime Anytime.
Gaming
Let's get one thing clear: mobile gaming will not take over consoles and pc. It's not going to happen. With that said, if you're a casual, and I mean casual gamer, it's this or the Ouya which is also $100. Like I mentioned earlier, the big problem is that the Fire TV doesn't come with a controller and you have to buy it for an additional $40. For now, we'll have to wait a bit and see which platform offers more games. Oh, and can we stop using fake currency and just use dollar amounts? The controller comes with 1,000 free Amazon Coins which is the company's currency for games.
Special Features
Amazon has some cool ideas here, I'll give them that. Voice control is fun to use occasionally on Xbox, so hopefully they can get it right here. ASAP is an interesting feature that will predict what you're going to watch and preload it so you don't have to wait. I can see this being flawed due to the fact it's only predicting what you'll want to watch. Let's say I want to watch 24, but instead it preloads Justified. That will only cause a hassle as the box has to exit the previous show then it has to load the one I want to watch. Free Time is essentially a kids mode, but there's also Free Time Unlimited where for $3 a month you'll get more content from Nickelodeon and the likes and free games, a bit like Playstation Plus, so depending on the content they offer this seems like a winner. Amazon is also offering a second screen experience if you have a Kindle where if you're watching something you can use your Kindle to look stuff up on IMDb related to what you're watching. This is something you can do with a Chromecast, but that requires going to the IMDb website itself so this is a nice little feature, but requiring a Kindle is the downside. Having Karaoke for music is also neat, but it requires buying songs from Amazon and I don't know anyone who does that.
Overall, this was about a year late if Amazon wanted it to be successful. For $99, the reasons aren't that appealing to keep me from buying a Chromecast or Roku Stick. If we were talking Apple TV, maybe, but you would need HBO GO first. If this had been $50 I'd consider it, but the asking price is too high.
Thanks for reading, as always follow me on Twitter @ThemeParks4Life.
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