A new fireTV that controls your cable box.
What's going on, I'm Rich Demiro.
This is Rich on Tech Daily. Amazon just unveil the fireTV Cube. This is a brand new four K device that pretty much combines the best of Echo, Alexa and the fireTV Plus. It adds new voice control features that lets you control your TV soundbars and even cable boxes. That means it can help you turn on the TV, watch a show, raise the volume, and even tune in a regular old TV channel just by asking. So taking a look at the fireTV Cube, it's a black box
with just four controls on the top. If you take a look at the back, you've got a USB port, an infrared por so, an IR blaster, an HDMI por and then power. So it's a very simple device. It has Alexa built in. It has all the apps that you know and love like Prime Video, Hulu, ESPN, Fox Now, Showtime, Stars, PlayStation and View, CBS All Access and NBC.
But here's the deal.
You can use your voice to control a lot of the things that you would normally do with your remote control. So Amazon used the launch of this Firetvcube to say that you can now use your voice to control Netflix. So now you can say something like Alexa, play Stranger Things on Netflix, and your TV will come to life and start playing the show.
Now, I haven't tested the fireTV Cube.
Just yet, so I can't say how easy this all is to set up or how effective it is, but I can tell you that I do have a similar feature available with my Chrome Cast four K, which is connected to my TV and also connected to my Google Home. I have said things like, Hey, Google, play Inspector Gadget on Netflix, and it literally will turn on my TV and start playing Inspector Gadget for my kids right where it left off the last time. Now, one thing to
keep in mind. With my Chrome Cast, I can search for a YouTube video pretty easily, but with Amazon YouTube is not supported by fireTV.
With an app, you can use the.
Web browser to access YouTube, but that means you will not get voice commands with YouTube, which to me on the Apple TV or with Chrome Cast is kind of a big deal because YouTube has a lot of stuff. Now, taking a look at the remote control, it looks like your standard fireTV remote control, I do wish that they included a volume up and volume down button on it, and also a power button.
For the TV.
It's kind of odd that they didn't, but I guess they want you to use your voice commands to do all this stuff. So how is it controlling all of your home devices? Well, it does this through the use of something called Hdmi CEC. This is kind of a standardized control home theater manufacturers agree to a while back. You probably don't even know about it, but a lot
of devices actually have this built in. And in fact, if you have a Chrome Cast connected to your TV, if you press the pause button on your TV remote, you'll notice it'll probably pause the video playing on your Chrome Cast. That's HDMI CEC in action. It pretty much allows the fireTV to control all kinds of devices through the Hdmi connect.
Now.
fireTV also ups this a little bit with support for an IR blaster so it can control cable and satellite TV boxes. Amazon mentioned support for Comcast, Dish and Direct TV, but they do have a way to check for support on their website. This is a nice thing to have now. I think a lot of people who are getting boxes like this are kind of chord cutters, but there's still a whole bunch of people out there who have old fashioned cable TV boxes, so this will be a nice in between.
Technology to kind of bridge that gap.
The things the fireTV Cube will not do that your typical Echo will Alexa calling and messaging, although we all heard about that Alexa recording the conversation and sending it to a colleague, so we probably don't want that feature right now anyway. Bluetooth sink and multi room music are also not supported, and I find that kind of odd, especially for the multi room music, because the fireTV Cube is meant to be sort of the centerpiece of your
living room. So if you can't call out the songs you want to hear or the music you want to.
Play across all of your Echo speakers.
In your entire house, that's kind of an odd thing to not have included. But hopefully Amazon will include that in a future software update. Overall, it seems like the fireTV Cube is a solid addition to the set top box competition. Now. I've been using my Apple TV four K a little bit more these days, especially after the whole YouTube fiasco, but the fireTV system otherwise has pretty much every app that you need with a significantly cheaper
price tag. So how much does this one cost? The fireTV Cube is available for pre order starting today for one hundred and twenty dollars. Is ships with the IR Extender cable and also the Ethernet adapter, and that's going to ship on June twenty first.
But here's a cool deal.
If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can get the Cube for just ninety dollars, which is thirty dollars off the regular price, by pre ordering today or tomorrow, So that's June seventh and June eighth only. Now keep in mind that Prime Day is coming up in July, so if you don't want to make the decision today for that thirty dollars savings, I'm assuming that Amazon will discount
this box a bit next month. It might not be down to ninety dollars, but you will probably find some sort of discount on this next month as well.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you want to see pictures of the Amazon fireTV Cube or get the link to order it on Amazon, just go to my website.
It is richontech dot tv.
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App that way more people discover it. I'm Rich Demiro. I'll talk to you real soon.