Fire TV

After much mulling about whether to go for Amazon’s Fire TV box I ended up plumping for their offer – largely as it wasn’t going to cost me much. As well as their half price offer, I also had a pre-paid credit card which I received for signing up with the AA so I only had to spend out £9 on it. I also tried out having the package delivered to our local Post Office after having a few parcels going AWOL lately. That seemed to work quite well and as it is located in the local Spar and I can (apparently) pick up parcels any time up to 10 at night.

The Fire TV box itself is quite tiny – about the size of a small cigar box. It comes with a wireless connection but I connected to the internet using the Ethernet cable that had been feeding the TV (and, latterly, the Blu-ray player) and connected to the TV via an HDMI cable. Initially it updated the software which took about 15 minutes and then it bust into life – seemingly recognising my Amazon prime account without prompting which I found a little disconcerting. I’m assuming that Amazon put the device’s MAC address into their system when they dispatched it.

First impressions are actually very good. Aside from having a working Amazon Instant Video connection, I was amazed at just how fast the whole thing is. Using either the smart TV or Blu-ray connections was glacial. The Fire TV box responds almost instantly to the simple remote. I downloaded a couple of apps and found the fast response to be replicated on the iPlayer which had been a torturous click-wait-click-waitsomemore procedure previously.

One of the tricks of the Fire TV box is that it has a voice enabled search. This actually only works on the Amazon products which is a little annoying but I can see that it would be awkward to program this as a standard input device. However, it works very well. I tried a few searches and it picked up everything I said perfectly. There is an old joke (mostly true) that voice recognition doesn’t work with Scottish accents so I thought I’d put this to the test by inflicting the kids’ Falkirk accents on the box. Happily it dealt with requests for “Toy Story”, “Paddington” and “Doctor Who” without the slightest of issues. Also, on the subject of kids, the parental controls appear to be quite thorough on this – just as well as the Amazon side of things ties into my credit card details.

I wanted to push the voice search to the limit so I decided to see what it would make of Eddie the talking whippet. I managed to get him to say something into the speaker and it resolved this as “Rom Com”. For all these years I had thought Eddie was wanting to discuss the global geo-political situation, interpretations of quantum mechanics or Friedrich Nietzsche’s atheistic existentialism. As it turns out, he simply has a desire to watch a series of disappointing movies starring Jennifer Aniston or Hugh Grant.

Where the voice search did fall down is when looking for foreign movies. I tried seemingly simple searches for “Das Boot”, “Abre los Ojos” and “Le Retour de Martin Guerre”. OK, my pronunciation may not be perfect but it made almost no sense at all of what I was asking for. I suppose it might work a bit better if the English equivalents were used but then it is equally possible that it will merely default to English language remakes. It does have a text input method for the search but this is a dreadful thumbwheel type affair which I would rather avoid.

 Now for the downsides. Generally, this appears to have a well written operating system but I have experienced a Blue Screen of Death whilst browsing. This is actually a mixed blessing as, whilst any catastrophic software error is unwelcome, at least this doesn’t just freeze interminably requiring switching off and on at the wall of which many home entertainment devices seem to suffer. The reboot is also very swift. Rather more annoying, considering I was hoping for a one-box streaming solution, is that it doesn’t have the Channel 4 catch up player, All-4 (previously 4OD). It does seem to have some of the Channel 4 content available via Amazon so maybe this is a commercial decision but it is very annoying.

So overall, I’m quite happy with this – especially given how little I had to pay for it. However, this does appear to be a gateway into Amazon’s universe in a similar way that NowTV ties into the Sky empire, Apple TV will tie into the Apple-sphere, Chromecast into Google and so on. I suppose this all comes down to the lack of standards for streaming devices but that appears to be the nature of the beasts: ultimately, someone, somewhere is trying to sell you something.