Amazon has unveiled a new device for your television. It’s called Amazon Fire TV. In the industry, it’s known as a set-top box. It’s black, about the size of a ham sandwich, and extremely powerful. It has “over 3x the processing power of Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku 3,” according to Amazon’s press release, “plus 4x the memory of Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku 3 for exceptional speed and fluidity.” Your Fire TV “arrives pre-registered,” which means that after you plug it into your HDTV and connect it to your WiFi, you are immediately ready to consume hundreds of thousands of movies, TV episodes, songs, and video games in 1080p HD video and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound, without ever getting up from your chair.
Your Fire TV is very fast. Why should you have to wait a full ten seconds for “Expendables 2” to buffer before it plays? And you don’t need to search for “Our Idiot Brother” by typing laboriously on an alphabet grid using your remote control. Just hold the Fire TV remote control, which is about the size of a Snickers bar, up to your mouth and say, “Our Idiot Brother,” and Amazon’s voice search, which is “optimized to understand Amazon’s video, app, and game catalog,” will instantly locate it.Your Fire TV has an Advance Streaming and Prediction feature that will record data from your Watchlist and personalized recommendations, deduce your preference for soft-core teen comedy flicks, and automatically buffer “Virgin High” for playback “before you even hit play,” so that you can watch it the instant you admit to yourself that you want to, as you inevitably will. Like Amazon’s patented anticipatory-shipping technology—which, one day, might use your shopping history to place products on trucks near your location before you’ve even thought about buying them—Advance Streaming and Prediction, or A.S.A.P., knows more about your habits and desires than you do. (...)
Convenience, selection, price. As James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester, told the Times, “Amazon has a vested interest in making sure it is present at every moment of possible consumption, which is all the time. It wants to get into the television screen and start to build a relationship.” Streaming devices are revolutionizing television just as, six years ago, the Kindle revolutionized books. Just as the Kindle is designed to be a portal that brings readers into a permanent relationship with the Amazon universe, Fire TV will do the same for television viewers, who, according to researchers, tend to be binge consumers, with even shorter attention spans and more compulsive shopping habits than book buyers, making them the ideal customers for “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
by George Packer, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Diane Bondareff/Invision for Amazon/AP
