Amazon has been working on constantly improving its lineup of Fire TV and Fire TV Edition devices, in an effort to take on Apple, Google, and more importantly, Roku. The company has now announced a bunch of new Fire TV-branded products at IFA 2019, which are focused on improving the company’s market share in Europe, where Roku is its biggest competitor. The company has launched the all-new Amazon Fire TV Cube, along with new Fire TV Edition products that include a soundbar, OLED TVs, and more.
The biggest launch in this set from IFA 2019 is, of course, the new Amazon Fire TV Cube. The device is the successor to the original Fire TV Cube, which was launched in June 2018 and combined the capabilities of the Fire TV range and the Echo range of Alexa-enabled smart speakers. The device has far-field voice recognition with eight microphones for hands-free Alexa capabilities, and a hexa-core processor that promises better performance.
The second-gen Fire TV Cube is priced at $120 (approximately Rs. 8,600), and comes with support for 4K and HDR content up to the Dolby Vision format, and the ability to stream from various services including Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and YouTube. The new Fire TV Cube is up for pre-order, and ships on October 10 in various markets.
The company has also announced various Fire TV Edition products; these are essentially regular products built by other companies, but have Amazon’s Fire TV software and capabilities built in. The most interesting of these is the Anker Nebula soundbar, which is set to be release on November 21. The soundbar has Fire TV built in with support for 4K and HDR (up to Dolby Vision) passthrough; the same device serves as both a 2.1-channel soundbar and a Fire TV streaming device when connected to a TV.
Some of the other Fire TV Edition products launched are relevant to the company’s push to gain a bigger market share in Europe. These include Fire TV Edition televisions from brands such as JVC, Grundig, and Toshiba. Among these is a Grundig Fire TV Edition OLED TV, which is the first OLED Fire TV-branded television, and goes on sale in Germany on November 21.
Many of these Fire TV Edition products are meant to take on Roku, which has a strong position in Europe with its own Roku Edition products. Many of these products are unlikely to be launched in India, where the Amazon Fire TV stick series is much more popular. Amazon claims to have sold over one million Fire TV Stick devices in India since the launch of the range.