Tell this set-top box what you want to watch
There are plenty of devices for watching streaming video on your TV, from Blu-ray players and set-top boxes, to smart TVs themselves, but almost all of them get their interfaces wrong. They present you with a grid of icons, similar to the homescreen of a smartphone or tablet, and you then search for what you want to watch either by clicking on each icon and then scrolling through long, juddery lists that are slow to load or by typing search words using a fiddly on-screen keyboard via the remote.
Amazon’s Fire TV set-top box takes a different approach that comes close to getting it right. The interface is dominated by a series of carousels that scroll horizontally. The top carousel shows you the TV shows and movies that you’ve watched recently, and you can resume watching from where you left off. Other carousels show' new' additions to Amazon’s library of content, categories such as Kid’s TV or ‘Action and Adventure’, as well as suggestions based on your viewing history. We found that scrolling through the carousels was fast and smooth, and the interface is refreshingly easy to use compared to the competition.
Although you can tap out search words using the clumsy on-screen keyboard, it’s much easier to simply press and hold the mic button on the remote control and speak your search terms into the remote’s built-in microphone. Unlike the voice search on smart TVs, the voice recognition here was almost always spot on. The search results themselves were flawed, though. Searching for ‘Doctor Who’, for example, showed only the most recent series and not older series which we found instead in the carousels. Searching for ‘Roman Polanski’ and ‘film noiri drew a blank even though Chinatown is available.
There’s plenty to watch with a broad range of movies and TV shows available either to buy or rent, from the usual Hollywood and home-grown fare, to more exotic Bollywood and continental art house choices. Some content is included in Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service which costs £5.99 a month (a free one-month trial is included with the Fire TV). This service lets you watch as much as you want, with no extra charges, from a huge selection. It doesn’t include the very latest releases, but does include shows commissioned by Amazon itself.
If something is missing from Amazon’s catalogue, there are apps to fill the blanks. Apps for Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Demand 5, STV and Curzon Cinema’s art house film-streaming service are available. ITV Player, 4oD and Blinkbox are missing, though. Apps reveal another flaw in the interface: content from these apps aren’t included in voice-search results and don’t appear in the carousel of your recently watched programs.
Extra features include games and music-streaming apps, such as Spotify, as well as the ability, with just a few' clicks on the remote, to listen to music bought from Amazon’s MP3 store and view any photos you’ve stored on Amazon’s online-storage service. The only way to play your own video files is to store them on a NAS and stream them using an app.
The Fire TV itself is a small, plain black box. Since the remote uses Bluetooth instead of infrared, you don’t need to point the remote at the box to make it work. You can therefore tuck the box out of sight. Setting it up is a doddle, with a simple wizard and video tutorial appearing onscreen the first time you use the Fire TV. More tutorials are available if needed.
Amazon’s FireTV comes close to being the perfect way to watch streaming video, but its slick interface needs refinement and you have to be happy buying into Amazon’s various services to get the most out of it. For now we’d rather use the Roku 3, but wre hope Amazon improves upon this very promising first step.
VERDICT
This set-top box has the best interface yet for browsing and watching streaming video, but it still has its flaws.
SPECIFICATIONS
1x HDMI • 1x 10/100Mbps Ethernet • 1x optical audio • 18x115x115mm (HxWxD) • 281g • One-year warranty