Amazon’s New Fire TV Edition Has a Great Interface, But the Killer App Is Your Voice

Old way to watch Game of Thrones: Find the TV remote, set the input to your Amazon Fire TV Stick, find the TV Stick remote, turn on the TV Stick, scroll over a few clicks and down a few clicks to HBO NOW, scroll over a few more clicks and down a few more clicks to Game of Thrones, then to Season 7, then to the new episode, then press play.

New way to watch Game of Thrones: “Alexa, find Game of Thrones.” Press play.

In the most basic sense, Amazon’s new Fire TV Edition is a smart TV with a built-in Fire TV Stick. In use, though, the TV Edition is a completely different beast because everything is in one place and Alexa has access to all of it. “Alexa, switch to the Blu-ray player.” “Alexa, find the Red Sox game.” “Alexa, volume down.” “Alexa, rewind 10 seconds.” The device brings together a streaming device, hundreds of apps, Alexa and an Element 55-inch display (that boasts a 4K UHD display).

And it’s been a big hit in the early going. Amazon debuted the Fire TV Edition earlier this month, sold out of it on Prime Day and is presently back-ordered for eight to nine days. To find out what all the fuss is about, Decider sat down with Matthieu Chamik, principal product manager for Fire TV.

DECIDER: You launched the new Fire TV interface in 2016. What were the main priorities for the redesign?

MATTHIEU CHAMIK: Amazon Fire TV launched four years ago, and we launched the second-generation Fire TV Stick last year with a new interface. The previous interface was more vertical and had a series of rows that highlighted content. We wanted to make it more engaging, more cinematic, more dynamic, and part of that was simplifying it.

We have a space at the top of the screen that rotates content like new shows and new features that are available on the platform. And then we have content rows that are topical or that are managed by content partners like Netflix or HBO, which lets users see what’s new or what’s good on those apps without having to launch those apps.

That’s the same interface that’s on the Fire TV Edition. Are there any differences beyond adding a way to select inputs?

That’s the biggest difference. The Fire TV Edition has inputs so you can connect other devices to it. There’s a row that provides quick access to that, you can long-press the Home button on the remote to get to the inputs, and there’s integration with Alexa. You can just say “switch to PlayStation,” and the Fire TV Edition will take you to the PlayStation input. The other feature we added is the over-the-air TV tuner for connecting an antenna to get free broadcast channels, so we had to figure out how to bring that live content into the user experience.

And once you go to an input, you can use Alexa to come back to the main screen?

Right, Alexa is available from any input. There’s a microphone on the remote, and you can ask it from any input you’re on to go to another input, to find a movie, to search Wikipedia, to ask about restaurants in the neighborhood. You can do that from anywhere.

Is the over-the-air antenna integrated into any recording capabilities?

At this time, we have some onboard storage to pause live TV for a few minutes, and there’s an SD card slot and two USB slots that will allow you to add enough storage to pause for up to 60 minutes. Right now, there’s no DVR integration for what you want from the antenna.

Is integrating live TV into a DVR feature something that’s on your roadmap?

We’re always looking for ways to improve the experience, but I can’t comment on plans for adding that particular feature.

Are there other things Alexa can do on Fire TV Edition that you think will change how people use it differently from a TV that doesn’t have voice integration?

It changes everything. If you say “go to NBC,” Alexa understands to go to the live TV tuner and tune to NBC. You can say “mute” and “un-mute.” You can watch specific shows. We wanted to remove steps and simplify the experience by having the TV do what you say.

Are you incorporating Amazon retail into the Fire TV Edition interface?

You can access some of the Amazon.com purchase capabilities with Alexa like ordering something or checking order status the same as you can on Fire TV.

With a 55-inch TV and Alexa in the living room, do you expect to see developers focus particular functions — ordering a pizza, calling an Uber, doing simple math, checking the weather — on apps you can see on TV or on Alexa skills?

I have seen both sides growing their ecosystems, but the Alexa skills are catering more to those kinds of use cases. And having a screen brings a lot of functionality to voice response. When you ask about the weather, the display can show you information about that. We hope that developers will take advantage of that and come up with new ways for users to interact.

Apple TV has its TV app to prioritize new episodes of shows that users are currently watching. Do you see a corollary to that on Fire TV Edition?

We approach that a few different ways. We look at it from the standpoint of helping a user to back to something that have been watching. The home screen has a row that shows recent activities like watching a particular channel or application, and our content partners like HBO are helping to present their best content.

Are most of the new bundled TV apps available yet for Fire TV?

Most of them are. Sling TV, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue and some others have come to the platform.

I’ve been using a Fire TV Stick for six months or so, and I’ve had fewer interface problems, fewer crashes and fewer latency problems than on any other device, but I don’t know how universal that is. Have you been able to measure those things against other devices?

I’m glad to hear you’ve had a good experience. [Laughs.] That speaks to the high quality bar that we’ve set internally for devices, and we’re having that experience now with Fire TV Edition. I don’t have metrics comparing that experience to other devices to share, but we have worked very closely with our hardware manufacturers on stability and performance.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.