Amazon unveils Amazon FireTV

Published: April 2, 2014 12:31 PM /

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Amazon jumps into the video industry by introducing the Amazon Fire TV today at their press conference. After making some major puchases for their Amazon Prime video, more exclusively the blockbuster 24 announced on Monday, Amazon anounces Amazon Fire TV.

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"It's clear customers love this content, and they're watching on streaming media devices. We're selling millions of these devices, and we hear about what isn't working" says Peter Larsen, vice president at Amazon. "Search is too hard, customers say. Especially if you're not looking for best sellers."

"These three problems -- search, performance, closed ecosystem -- means "we need to event and simplify on behalf of customers."

This problem will be now solved by Amazon Fire TV. It will have some hardware underneath with a quad-core processor "with a dedicated GPU usually found in high-end smartphones" and 2 gigs of RAM. You're get the MIMO, dual-band Wifi that is currently in their Kindles. The remote will be bluetooth so out don't need to worry about pointing it right at the TV. It will feature Voice Search in this remote so you don't need to worry about it.

The interface looks very Netflixy. There is also a feature called ASAP, it will preload movies that you think you will watch so that they will load faster. Another feature is that you will be able to throw your photos via Amazon Cloud Drive and you can see it on the Fire TV. You will also have IMDB at your fingertips with X-Ray available on all shows.

It will be an open ecosystem with tons of partners already signed up. One notable person missing right now is HBO GO...but there's always the first update. It also has PLEX on it, so it will bring local content to this box as well.

Another feature for the FireTV is that with the music you play you can have an overlay for lyrics.

Amazon FreeTime makes the port over to FireTV and will give your kids a seperate playspace for kids that you can control.

And the big talk that everyone wants, Amazon Games will will have 1000s of games with big developers like Sega, EA, Disney for the next month. You will be able to play via your phone or the super cool Amazon Controller for $39.99. This will come with 1000 Amazon Coins as well. No further details of what the coins will be for at this time.

Amazon Stuidos will be putting their Double Helix purchase to good use as they will also make Amazon Game Studios which will produce games exclusively for the FireTV. Their first game will be called SevZero. It's a third-person shooter.

The price for the Amazon FireTV is $99 and it ships today. You can get it and the controller all together for $140.

You can order the product here on Amazon today!

And if you want to check out the weird ad with Mr. Buesy in it, here you go:

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JR Moore is the Former Chief Editor at TechRaptor. When he's not living life, he's connected to an Xbox, a phone or tablet checking out the latest… More about JR