Begun, the set-top box wars have.
Hot on the heels of Apple's new Apple TV announcement, Amazon unveiled a new version of its own Fire TV set-top box, Fire TV Stick HDMI dongle and a new Fire TV Gaming Edition on Thursday.
New to the second-generation Fire TV is 4K video support and the addition of Alexa, the voice assistant from the company's Echo smart home assistant/Bluetooth speaker.
The $99.99 Fire TV, which will ship on Oct. 5, is 75% more powerful than its predecessor thanks to a new quad-core processor from MediaTek, according to Amazon.
While there still isn't a ton of 4K content to watch, Amazon is leaping ahead of the competition and betting big on the higher-resolution format. The new Fire TV can stream 4K video from Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Video and Netflix. The catch, as always, is you'll need to own a 4K TV to take advantage of all the extra resolution.
With Alexa, users can use the remote control and ask their new Fire TVs for things like the weather, music, traffic and news -- like on the Echo.
The streaming box also supports HEVC, a new video codec, which should make streaming video more efficient and suck up less bandwidth. With the new codec, users should experience fewer "buffering" moments when the box is loading a video.
Amazon's also addressed the issue of expandable storage on the new Fire TV. The set-top box comes with 8GB of internal storage, but there's also a microSD card slot that can take memory cards up to 128GB.
The faster 802.11ac MIMO should also improve Wi-Fi performance and range.
In addition to the new Fire TV, Amazon also selling a special "gaming edition" of the Fire TV, which is more of a game bundle. The $139.99 bundle includes a new Fire TV, new Fire TV game controller, a 32GB microSD card and two games (Shovel Knight and Disney's Ducktales). It'll ship on Oct. 22.
And not to be left out, the Fire TV Stick also got a small update. It now comes with a voice remote control so you can use voice commands, like ask it to play a specific movie, or bring up shows from a specific director. It'll be available for $49.99 and ship on Oct. 22.