The power light on the front of the Fire TV.
In early April, Amazon announced that its long-rumored video streaming media box was finally coming to market. According to Amazon, the Fire TV wasn't just another slightly differently shaped rectangular prism of plastic. Fire TV was no less than the solution to so many of the problems plaguing its competitors.
A significant part of Amazon's Fire TV presentation was couched in the criticism of currently available media players, and the company harped on three points: performance, closed ecosystems, and complexity. When we looked closer at the Fire TV, we saw some solutions. But these fixes are too half-baked and too limited in scope. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't appear to be looking for an answer to the big media box issues as much as it's interested in finding less-glaring ways of cutting the same corners. As a result, functionality is expended for Amazon's own self-absorption.
From left, the Fire TV box, the remote, and the power cable that come in the box.
On the hardware and setup
Our review unit came with a separate HDMI cable in the bag, which means you'll have to supply your own. Everything else, including batteries for the remote, comes in the box. The Fire TV itself is simple, flat, and black without even a set of feet to hold it up off the ground. Instead, the bottom is surfaced with a rubbery plastic.
The remote has a directional pad, top and center, in addition to functional buttons like Home, Back, and Play/Pause. It connects with the box via Bluetooth, so there is no need to point it in the right direction. However, because it has no IR blaster, you'll still need your TV remote around to control volume and the like.
When you first plug the Fire TV in, a tiny LED pulses at the front left corner to show the device is awake. The first step in setting up the device is connecting to the Wi-Fi network.
The ports available on the Fire TV: HDMI, optical audio, Ethernet, and USB 2.0.
One of the significant criticisms Amazon had of other streaming media devices was how you have to type by scrolling around an alphabetical keyboard with the directional buttons on a remote, hunting and pecking letters. It's a totally valid criticism that has long needed a solution. So you can imagine our surprise when the first thing the Fire TV asks you to do is… hunt and peck the letters on an alphabetical keyboard by scrolling around with the directional buttons on the remote to put in your Wi-Fi password.
One long, loud, unskippable product introduction later, and the device displays the home screen. Each Fire TV comes pre-setup with the Amazon ID of the user who bought it, so thankfully there is no more hunting and pecking to do. That is, until you want to log in to your Netflix or Hulu account, but that is a story for the apps section.
Watch the Fire TV fail to comprehend the name of the lead actress in one of its major TV shows on offer.
Media performance
Another meaty complaint Amazon had about competing media boxes was that they tend to be a little bit pokey—loading screens litter the time between when a user picks a video to watch and the time it starts playing. Again, valid; we (as a media box-using society) should have moved beyond this already.
Amazon's approach to this problem is two-pronged. One, it has designed its box with slightly beefier hardware than you might find in a Roku or Apple TV. Two, it has a content pre-load scheme called "ASAP" that is meant to predict what content you will watch next and cache it, allowing the box to begin playing immediately when you come to it. For instance, if you watch the first three episodes of a TV show, it stands to reason you'll watch the next few. Hence, your Fire TV will take the liberty of pulling the upcoming episodes ahead of time.
Most menus on the Fire TV operate quickly enough, and scrolling through the cover-flow-like rows of stuff to watch is smooth. Where we ran into consistent problems is navigating backward through the menus. Sometimes the back button worked instantly, sometimes it took a few presses. Sometimes we could press the left directional button to go back and that worked, except sometimes it didn't.
When it comes to browsing Amazon content, the Fire TV is frustratingly obscure. During the announcement event in New York, as Amazon VP Peter Larsen showed off the device's search features, a reporter called out a question: "Will we be able to search just for content that is free?" Larsen demurred, but it turns out that not only is free content (with a Prime membership) hard to find, the free content that exists is difficult to identify.
As you browse TV shows or movies on the device, they will all display buy buttons below the piece of content selected. Movies are available to rent or buy, and there are separate buttons to buy either a single episode of a show or the entire season.
Contrary to what you might expect, these buttons don't disappear for content that is free to watch. The content has the words "watch now" printed on it if it's free under a Prime membership, but it's not immediately clear when a given piece of content doesn't need to be purchased.
Fire TV is not as clear as it could be about what content is freely available for Prime members, ostensibly a large draw for owning such an Amazon-centric product.
Hence, you can forget about explicit labels, let alone a content tab or search dedicated to videos that are free. The best Amazon does is organize "new" Prime content, which is not all Prime content. Not that there is a ton of free content to go around on Amazon's platform anyway, but if that's what you were hoping to easily come across, adjust your expectations.
What's worse is the lack of content democracy. In the most recent Roku updates, it's possible to search all of Roku's channels for a given work—say, season 3 of Bob's Burgers. The search results will then show which apps have the content available and for how much money (a la the website canistream.it).
Expect no such service on the Fire TV. Front and center will be Amazon's version of season 3 of Bob's Burgers, which costs $2.99 per HD episode or $39.99 for the season. If you navigate to Apps and then Netflix, you'll see that season 3 is available to freely stream. It's still there and available, but you have to do some poking around.
Amazon is a business, and it's entitled to put itself first when marketing its stuff. Just know that this is what you, their loyal customer, are getting.
By Casey Johnston and Sam Machkovech arstechnica.com
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