As the cost of ultra-HD TV sets go down, the amount of available 4K content steadily grows. All is well with the world. Things are about to get even better on the content front with the impending release of the new Amazon Fire TV, which upgrades the set-top box to a 4K-capable streaming powerhouse.
Outside, it looks exactly the same as the original Fire TV. Inside, though, it’s a significant upgrade, with a new 64-bit quad-core MediaTek processor and a dedicated GPU, making it 75 percent faster on the processing front with twice the graphical muscle, ensuring it’s powerful enough to handle all your 4K streams. Since 4K will eat up a lot of bandwidth, they also throw in 2×2 802.11ac MIMO WiFi, improving both long-range performance and the amount of traffic it can handle.
Don’t have an ultra-HD TV yet? You may still want to get the Amazon Fire TV since it supports HEVC (high efficiency video coding), allowing it to deliver higher quality 1080p streams at around half the bit rates. Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant from the Echo, also comes onboard the streaming box, joining the Voice Remote feature so you can keep reciting voice commands, regardless of what you want to see on the TV. It also powers using just two AAA batteries, a single pair of which can last it an entire year. On the content front, Amazon claims they have more 4K movies on the roster, too, compared to any video streaming service out there, so you can really pig out on high-resolution programming once you have this thing set up.
Slated to ship on October 5th, the Amazon Fire TV is priced at $99.99.