The what and why of Amazon’s FireTV…

One of the things I have been playing around and with is the Amazon Fire TV. Not, as a content device, although it is nice to use for that, but rather as a voice control device for my media. I have in the past couple of years uploaded the majority of my MP3 library (all legal of course), pictures and videos to our Amazon drive. Amazon Prime allows you to upload all of your pictures for free, plus we’ve added additional storage to our account via paying additionally for it.

Cloud storage is interesting, but the Amazon Fire TV system gives you a client or front end for that cloud storage. I have argued that the cellular phone is, in fact, the client for the cloud. It remains the client for the cloud, but when we are talking about consuming media, the cellular phone is a swiss army knife. Yes good, it can do the job, but not as well as a device as the FireTV can. Connected to your home entertainment system, FireTV plays those images in much better fidelity. The problem of course, with streaming, is the impact on your home network.

The internet of things is advertised and touted as the future. Billions of connected devices sharing information. The problem, of course, is that they are sharing information on the same network your media is downloading into. In fact, if you aren’t careful you will spend your evening watching old home movies, buffering. Once upon a time, now close to 20 years ago, we expected to buffer when we launched media. Now, that tends to frustrate people. No one wants to buffer content every 5 minutes.

That makes the end game interesting. Amazon has a great product with their FireTV systems. The client for your online media!