Gadgetory

the battle for the living room box is heating up with Amazon fire TV I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update amazon wants to be the center of your living room entertainment with a new set-top box that streams video music and also games it's called fire TV and it costs one hundred dollars on sale now it's not the cheapest choice in streaming media to your television but it does have plenty of perks to compete with Apple TV Roku and Google's chromecast the thin square box measures four and a half inches across and it's said to have three times the performance power of the other streaming devices on the market during a demo amazon showed how it can zip through menus and if you hate typing using the arrow keys on a remote control amazon lets you avoid that by simply speaking your search query there's a little microphone inside the remote it has dozens of apps to stream video including Netflix Hulu Plus ESPN and YouTube and of course it has access to Amazon's digital library of movies and TV shows parents can set up kid restricted profiles with Amazon free time and for an extra three dollars a month kids get access to unlimited programming from networks like Nickelodeon Sesame Street and PBS it has apps to stream music and get this it can also show lyrics to the music you're playing karaoke party anyone but the big feature here is gaming amazon worked with sega EA and disney to have tons of games customized to work with fire TV many games will be casual free apps like the typical stuff you find in an android app store but other games will cost a few bucks and more than 1,000 games will be free to play amazon is even making its own games it created sep 07 dollars but it does come included if you spend an extra forty dollars on amazon's game controller and amazon also throws in ten dollars to spend in credits and here's an interesting tidbit you can play music from pandora while you're in a game at $99 the fire TV is the same price as apple TV and it's more expensive than the roku or chromecast but it could really set itself apart with the gaming features then again if you wanted a stream video you probably already on a device that can do that savvy consumers may go to Amazon for when it's time for an upgrade and during all this amazon news microsoft unveiled the voice assistant Cortana it's the windows phone version of Siri it's named after the computer from the halo video game it's still in beta microsoft also announced updates to windows including a new version of the start menu thank goodness you can get more details at cnet com and I'll cover that more on the next episode from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey