Fire TV and the Streaming Box Pileup on My Shelf

So Amazon finally did the thing everybody's been guessing about for months. This morning they announced Fire TV, their own $99 streaming box, and its shipping today — not "coming soon," not preorder, actually available right now if you want one. That part's kind of impressive on its own. Most of these announcements come with a six week wait.

Here's my actual reaction though: I now own, or have owned, basically every box in this category, and I'm getting a little tired of the shelf under my TV looking like a server rack.

The pitch for Fire TV is a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, which sounds like overkill for a device whose main job is showing you Netflix, but the idea is it's fast — no more of that lag where you pick something and stare at a black screen for four seconds wondering if you actually pressed the button. They're also touting something called ASAP, which supposedly predicts what you're going to watch next and starts buffering it before you ask. I dont know how well that works in practice yet, obviously, since I havent had my hands on one, but its a neat idea if it isnt just marketing fluff. Netflix does something similar with pre-caching already so its not totally out of nowhere.

There's a $39.99 add-on controller too, because apparently this thing also wants to be a mild gaming console, with some free-to-play style games in the store. That's the part that made me raise an eyebrow. I already have a Wii U gathering dust and an Xbox 360 that mostly exists to play Netflix on, and now theres a third thing in the room that wants to also be a game machine. Nobody asked for this, but here we are.

The actual comparison that matters

If you're trying to figure out whether to buy one, it comes down to price and what you already own. Roku 3 is also $99 and has been the safe answer for two years now. Apple TV is $99 too but only makes sense if youre already deep in the Apple stuff, which a lot of people are, fair enough. And then theres the Chromecast at $35, which does way less but does it without cluttering up your remote drawer, and I genuinely think for most people that's still the smarter buy. Not everyone needs a dedicated box with its own interface and its own remote and its own app store to relearn.

What's actually new here isnt the hardware, its that Amazon is the one making it. They've got Prime Instant Video obviously, but also the leverage to push their own ecosystem front and center the way Apple does with iTunes on Apple TV. Thats the real story, not the specs sheet. Its a company that sells you everything else now also wanting to be the box that funnels you toward buying more stuff from them. Which, fine, that's how this works, I'm not shocked, but I'd like it noted for the record.

Small tangent, because I cant help it: yesterday was April 1st and Google did their usual thing where Maps had a "Pokemon Challenge" built in, sending you around the map hunting for hidden Pokemon to "catch." I lost about forty minutes of a Tuesday afternoon to that instead of doing literally anything productive, and I regret nothing. Somebody at Google has entirely too much fun with April Fools every year and I hope they never stop.

Anyway. Back to boxes. I think the honest test for Fire TV isnt going to be the specs, its going to be whether the software feels fast in six months, after an update or two, the way Roku's interface has slowly gotten a little more sluggish over the years as they've bolted more channels onto it. Every one of these things is snappy on day one. The question is day three hundred.

I'll probably end up trying one anyway, not because I need a fourth streaming box (I dont, I really dont) but because Ive got an Amazon Prime account already loaded with stuff I've bought over the years, and there's something appealing about a box thats actually built around that instead of treating Prime Video like an afterthought app buried three menus deep, which is basically what happens on the Roku right now. That alone might be worth the $99, even if the gaming controller stays in the box unopened.