In 2016, Amazon brought the Amazon Prime Video to India. It comes for free with the Amazon Prime Subscription and offers a lot of Indian and American movies and TV shows and Amazon originals for free to Prime users. To tell you frankly, I became a Prime user only because of Prime Video. And I'm loving it! (Check out my review of Amazon Prime Video)
You can watch Prime Video content on computers and smartphones. However, as Amazon hadn't made Fire TV Stick available in India, so streaming the Prime Video content on TV sets was a problem.
Well, not anymore. On 19 th April, 2017, Amazon has finally launched a Fire TV stick for Indian consumers.
Commenting upon this launch, Marc Whitten, Vice President, Amazon Fire TV said, "Fire TV Stick offers access to a vast selection of movies and TV shows, popular apps, and features designed specifically for customers in India including powerful voice search for Amazon Video titles in Hindi and English,"
Amazon Fire TV Stick:
A Fire TV Stick is a small device that can be plugged into an HDTV to stream entertainment content from services like Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar, Eros Now, Voot, Airtel Movies and more. The Fire TV Stick that Amazon has launched in India comes with a Voice Remote control. It is equipped with quad-core processor and supports 802.11ac MIMO Wi-Fi for ensuring fast media streaming. It supports High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) and is capable of giving customers more 1080p HD streams from their existing Internet connection.
The Key Features of Amazon Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote are:
Easy Set up:
To use the Fire Stick on your HDTV, just plug it in the TV set like a USB device, attach the power cable and connect it to Wi-Fi. That's it. You can start enjoying the online content on your TV. If you purchase the Stick from Amazon.in, it will come pre-registered with the customer's Amazon account.
Portable:
The Fire Stick is a portable device. It can be carried anywhere and used wherever there is an HDTV and a Wi-Fi connection available.
ASAP Feature:
Amazon Prime Video has a Watchlist where users can line up all the content they want to watch. It also makes recommendation based upon the user's watch history and suggests what the user might want to watch next. For example, if you are watching a series, its next episode will appear in the Watch Next section. The Fire TV Stick can see this and predict what the user might want to watch using the Advanced Streaming and Prediction (ASAP) feature. It then prepares the playback so you can start watching as soon as you hit play, without any buffering.
Data Monitoring:
This feature allows user to select their preferred viewing quality to manage data use. They can set the limit of monthly broadband data use and configure the Fire TV Stick to alert when the data use approaches this limit.
Voice Search:
The Fire TV Stick comes with a Voice Remote which can recognize voice commands and search out the content in Amazon Video. The Fire Stick available in India can recognize Hindi and English language commands.
Parental Controls:
Not all the content available at online streaming services is suitable for all age groups. Fire TV Stick has parental controls like 'access PIN' which can be used to restrict access to mature content.
Amazon Fire TV Stick Price in India:
The Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote is available from www.amazon.in/firetvstick and select retailers like Reliance Digital and Croma. Amazon Fire TV Stick is priced at ₹3,999 in India.
New Prime Video Goodies:
Amazon has also announced the release of three new titles which will be available exclusively for Prime members. These are:
- Baahubali: The Lost Legends (Bahibali's prequel)
- Oscar winner Suicide Squad
- Stand-up comedy special by Kenny Sebastian.
