Amazon Unveils Fire TV, Its Own Set-Top Box
Amazon wants to take over your TV. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a $99 set-top box called Amazon Fire TV. The device will start shipping immediately.
The huge Internet retailer showed off its latest piece of hardware— a device “thinner than a dime” that connects televisions to streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu and of course, Amazon’s own video streaming service.
“We need to invent and simplify on behalf of customers,” Peter Larsen, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle, said to a group of journalists and analysts in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “When we looked at the living room we took the same approach. How do we make the complexity disappear?”
Fire TV also comes with a “small, elegant” remote and is connected via Bluetooth, which “really helps to make it disappear,” Larsen said. The device itself will fit underneath or behind your TV.
