So just a week ago I found myself writing about my disappointment at the new Apple TV box not supporting 4K UHD video . I argued then that with so much 4K content and other 4K hardware around these days, it seemed seriously short-sighted of Apple not to include 4K streaming capabilities in its new TV box. And now Amazon has gleefully proved my point by announcing
– with perfect timing – that its second- generation Amazon Fire TV box WILL support 4K UHD streaming. What’s more, it will do so for a price of just $99.99 (£80 in the UK), comfortably undercutting what Apple is asking for its HD-only boxes.
The 4K capabilities of the new Amazon Fire TV will let users access the 4K UHD streams of Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Video, and Netflix . This adds up to hundreds of hours of 4K UHD content by the time you’ve taken into account all the films and TV series these three platforms currently offer in 4K.
Plus, of course, the amount of 4K content they offer is going to increase dramatically in the coming months as both Amazon and Netflix are committed to delivering the majority of their own home-grown shows in 4K UHD.
You will need both a 4K UHD television set with HDCP 2.2 (anti-piracy protocol) support and a broadband connection that
delivers a stable speed of at least 15Mbps to make use of the new Amazon Fire TV’s 4K streaming capabilities. But already the majority of big-screen TVs in stores now carry native 4K UHD
resolutions; the cost of 4K TVs is
plummeting; and the number of people able to access super-fast broadband is finally now growing fast.
While the new Amazon Fire TV’s 4K
capabilities are enough in themselves to make it a potential Apple TV killer, it also has a number of other attractions up its sleeve. For instance, it supports High
Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which should make it possible to deliver more Amazon Video 1080p HD streams into people’s homes than ever before thanks to the way HEVC’s extra compression
efficiencies reduce the burden on
broadband connections.
Amazon has also boosted the new
Amazon Fire TV’s brain power by a
claimed 75% by adding a MediaTek 64- bit quad-core processor and C GPU. This set up rivals the new Apple Q 3rd TV’s 64-bit A8 chip,
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