Amazon Fire TV hands-on: Prime comes to your living room @ $ 99

Amazon has just unveiled Fire TV, its first attempt at a set-top box for streaming movies, television shows, photos, games, and more straight to your TV. The Fire TV is all black and consists of a small, square box that connects to your televisions along with an even tinier remote. When turned on, the FireTV immediately displays a selection of new movies and TV shows in addition to various apps and games that you may want to dive in to. Options to browse through specific categories appear on the left-hand side of the screen, but if you know what you're looking for, you can easily begin a search from any screen just by speaking into a microphone on the remote. It won't just search through Prime Instant Video either: Netflix, Hulu, and a large number of other popular services are also supported.

Amazon says the Fire TV should be fast, and it actually is. On the inside, it has a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a dedicated GPU — specs that Amazon says should make the Fire TV three times more powerful than a Roku, Chromecast, or Apple TV. While that's going to be helpful for browsing and video playback, it'll be critical for gaming, which Amazon is positioning as a key part of this new platform, promising to have thousands of games by next month.