The Amazon Fire TV Stick - an outright rival to Google's Chromecast - has been made available for pre-order in the UK. Amazon has been selling the video streaming dongle in the US for some months, but is now taking orders for the £35 device on this side of the Atlantic, too.
The launch comes just a day after Google announced the UK availability of its Nexus Player, signalling that the big beasts of the tech industry are keen to ensure they get control of your living room viewing.
The Amazon Fire TV Stick shares a similar design and many of the features of Google's Chromecast, however there are key differences in the approach of the two devices. For starters, the Amazon Fire TV works as a standalone device - you don't need to stream content from a smartphone/tablet, it has built-in apps of its own for Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Spotify and many others. It also comes with a remote control, unlike the Chromecast, which is controlled via a mobile app. For an extra £25, that Amazon remote control can be upgraded to a model that supports voice recognition, although you can use the free Fire TV Remote app for iOS and Android to search by voice, too.
Amazon claims the hardware inside its Stick is far superior to that of the Chromecast. It packs a dual-core processor (the Chromecast is single core), 1GB of memory (512MB), 8GB of storage (2GB) and dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi (single band). That allows Amazon to offer features such as ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction), which attempts to second guess which movies or TV shows you're likely to watch and pre-buffers them, so that there's no lag when you press the play button.
That extra processing power does have a notable downside. Unlike the Chromecast, it cannot be powered from a USB port on the television - it has to be plugged into the electrical mains, which will add to the jumble of wires behind your TV.
Amazon also makes much of the Fire TV Stick's ability to play games such as Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Flappy Birds and Tetris. However, it's not compatible with some of the more demanding titles and the games controller that's available for the £79 Fire TV.
The retailer is once again using its hardware as bait for customers to sign up for the Amazon Prime service. In addition to the Amazon Instant Video library offered to Prime subscribers, Amazon is offering the Stick to customers who sign up for a new Prime subscription for only £7, or for £19 to existing Prime subscribers. Perhaps the first example of a company using a Stick as a carrot...
The Prime TV Stick is available for pre-order on Amazon now and will be released on 15 April.