So Amazon dropped a set-top box on us this week and my first reaction, honestly, was annoyance, because I bought a Roku 3 back in the fall and now I have to sit here doing spec comparisons like its my job. Fire TV showed up Wednesday, $99, shipping same day if you ordered it, and its clearly aimed straight at the Roku/Apple TV/Chromecast pile that's been sitting under TVs for the last couple years.
The specs are the part that actually got my attention. Quad-core processor, a dedicated GPU, 2GB of RAM. That is a genuinely absurd amount of horsepower for something whose main job is drawing a Netflix menu. My Roku 3 feels a little slow loading thumbnails sometimes and I'm now sitting here wondering if I got taken. Probably not, the Roku's fine, but this is exactly the kind of thing that gets in your head.
Amazon's calling the standout feature "ASAP," which is supposed to predict what you're about to watch and start buffering it before you hit play. I have no idea how well that actually works in practice and I'm sure the honest answer is "it works great for Amazon Prime content and shrugs at everything else," because that's how this always goes. Every one of these boxes eventually turns into an ad for its own store. Roku at least keeps a straight face about being neutral. We'll see how long Amazon keeps up the pretense that Netflix and Hulu are equal citizens on a box they built to sell you more stuff from amazon.com.
The part that actually annoyed me is the controller. If you want to do any gaming on this thing you need the separate Bluetooth game controller, which is another $39.99 on top of the box. So the "its like a game console too" pitch quietly turns into $139 the second you want to use the feature they demoed on stage. I get why they did it that way, not everyone wants a controller cluttering their living room, but advertise the box at its real price if gaming is going to be part of the sales pitch. Small thing, sure. Still bugs me.
I will say the enthusiast crowd is already excited about sideloading XBMC onto these (it's called Kodi now, I think, though half the internet still says XBMC out of habit) since the hardware is strong enough to actually handle it well. That's the kind of thing that makes a box worth owning past the first month, when the novelty of "look, voice search" wears off. A device that's only good at exactly the thing it shipped doing tends to end up in a drawer. Ask me how I know, I've got an old Roku 1 in a box somewhere that I swear I'll sell on Craigslist eventually.
None of this is going to make me replace the Roku. It does what I need, my cable box already handles the stuff Roku doesn't, and I am extremely tired of buying new HDMI-input boxes every single time a company decides the living room is the next battleground. At some point the TV itself should just do all this and none of us should need four little black boxes stacked next to each other collecting dust and cat hair. Mine already has three. Adding a fourth for a slightly faster processor and a feature I might use twice feels like exactly the kind of upgrade I make fun of other people for buying.
Also, completely unrelated, but has anyone else's DVR started randomly rebooting itself around 2am? Mine's done it three nights running and I keep waking up to a blinking clock like its 1998 again. Not tech news, just tired.
Anyway. Fire TV's out there now if you want one. I'll be over here with my Roku, feeling smug about the money I saved and slightly worried I made the wrong call.