How Amazon Fire TV Stacks Up to Competition

[Guest]

Amazon's Fire TV is out on the market. Here's how the Fire TV may look in comparison to other set-top boxes.

How Amazon Fire TV Stacks Up to Competition : Read more

 

[combine1237]

Can anyone comment if this supports fire HDX apps or streaming services like Dish anywhere?

 

[softskilled]

about the feature table: apple tv HAS internal storage, otherwise movies wouldn't be stored for later viewing when renting them.

 

[rwinches]

Apple TV 8GB internal storage.

 

[croc4]

Roku also has the option for adding storage via a uSD card

 

[Bean007]

Another damn box. No Gigabit port. Will it support repositories and can I install XBMC on it?

 

[jasonelmore]

Another damn box. No Gigabit port. Will it support repositories and can I install XBMC on it?

agree'd. people need to jump on the HDMI IN bandwagon like Xbox One. I havent hit the INPUT button on my remote for months, hell i havent even used a remote in a few days. Voice commands FTW

 

[gudomlig]

If it costs me like a buck plus shipping to buy an hdmi cable in some places online why can't amazon include a free one

 

[Dr-Emmerich]

Chromecast just needs to go away...useless at this point. If you're intrenched with iTunes you get Apple TV..if not you get Roku...end of story.

 

[spdragoo]

Just a nitpick, for the Roku the boxes come with a remote. Not sure if the stick does or not, although IIRC they advertise that you can use a mobile app to control the Roku stick.As for the whole RAM & internal storage...I guess that depends on what the boxes use it for. Except for account login information, my Roku box isn't really storing anything internally: everything is stored on the channel providers' external servers, otherwise I'd have 2 separate Netflix queues (1 for my Wii, 1 for my Roku), which kind of defeats their purpose. And while there might be some requirements on codec processing for higher-resolution formats, the biggest bottleneck on streaming video speeds is going to be your broadband connection: a quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM won't help someone if they're still "rocking" a 1 Mbps DSL connection.The short story is, Amazon's Fire TV box is more expensive than my Roku was, has a heck of a lot fewer channels, & doesn't provide any additional features that set it apart from anyone else. So, Roku for the win for me.

 

[Slatteew]

Another damn box. No Gigabit port. Will it support repositories and can I install XBMC on it?

agree'd. people need to jump on the HDMI IN bandwagon like Xbox One. I havent hit the INPUT button on my remote for months, hell i havent even used a remote in a few days. Voice commands FTW

I think we should adopt Display Port instead of HDMI, especially since Display has a lot more room to grow than HDMI, and does not cost anything extra to add on.

 

[Haravikk]

Doesn't the Apple TV have 8gb storage too? I know it's probably only for caching, but the way that Fire TV preloads content sounds a lot like it mostly uses the memory for caching too, even if you do have some control over it. Just saying! Still, the quad-core processor in the Fire TV is interesting, but I'm most interested by the possibilities of what else this little machine could be used for after installing Linux for example…

 

[stareagyl]

Uh - 1200+ Channels!! Not to mention the underground ones which Amazon and Google would never Touch (I threw away my AppleTV 5 years ago). Roku's published interface for channel creation remains the differentiator - IMHO