Amazon announces its $99 set-top box Fire TV

On sale now with the Game Controller sold separately

Amazon has finally announced its long-rumored media device and it’s available for purchase as of today. The $99 Amazon Fire TV supports expected streaming services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Prime Instant Video, and Pandora, but games also have a presence on the box which sports an Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB of memory, and a quad-core processor.

There a over a hundred games supported including Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Asphalt 8, and Amazon Game Studios’ exclusive third-person shooter Sev Zero, with “thousands more coming soon.” According to Amazon, many of these games are free and “the average price of paid games is just $1.85.” Of course, that less-than-ideal gamepad is being sold separately for $39.99.

There are a few interesting gimmicks, but the one that sounds most intriguing to me is ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction), a feature which predicts movies or television episodes you’ll want to watch and prepares them for playback ahead of time to avoid buffering. I’m not really in the market for the Fire TV as a Roku owner — and Amazon has a long way to go before it can pull me in with its gaming initiative — but this looks like a nice little box. Maybe someday.