Amazon Fire TV Enters the UK Broadband IPTV Streaming Market

First came Apple TV, then Roku (inc. Sky’s NOW TV service) followed by Google’s Chromecast and now Amazon’s Fire TV box has arrived in the United Kingdom to help put your broadband ISP connection to good use by streaming video and TV content instead of just getting it via a Satellite or that ugly antenna at the top of your house.

The new device includes most of the usual content, such as Sky News, Netflix, YouTube, Demand 5 (Channel 5), Spotify and of course Amazon Music / Prime Instant Video (formerly LOVEFiLM) among many other apps and services. But sadly there’s currently no mention of 4OD (Channel 4), ITV Player, BBC iPlayer or even Sky’s NOW TV service.

The lack of NOW TV isn’t surprising since BSkyB has an investment interest in Roku for its NOW TV service. Customers of the latter have been similarly frustrated by Amazon’s inability to put their Instant Video service on Sky’s device (me being one.. won’t be taking Prime again next year). Clearly both have competing interests, which in this case presents itself as an annoyance for consumers.

But the new device, which has gone on sale today for £79 (this compares with £97 for Apple TV, £25-30 for Chromecast, £93.56 for the Roku 3 or £9.99 for NOW TV [without subscription]), is a fair bit more powerful than most of its rivals thanks to a Qualcomm Krait 300 quad-core processor / Adreno 320 GPU (supports 1080p HD video quality), Dual-band/Dual-antenna WiFi, Bluetooth 4, 2GB of RAM (533MHz) and voice activation support (speak your commands). It also has some handy ports, including one for optical audio that we don’t often see on such units.

On top of that an additional Amazon game controller can also be purchased and naturally the device is powerful enough to display a number of well-known titles, such as Minecraft-Pocket Edition and Asphalt 8 etc. Many games are free and the average price of paid games is under £1.20.

It looks like a solid piece of kit, although the absence of content from some of the major UK broadcasters and NOW TV is likely to be galling for some. Funnily enough Sky chose this week to announce that NOW TV was available on Chromecast.

In terms of the broadband requirements, this tends to vary but it usually helps to have a stable speed of around 5Mbps (more is always beneficial in a larger household) and luckily that kind of performance is becoming fairly normal. The remaining gaps should be filled in over the next few years by Broadband Delivery UK’s scheme.