Quote:
Originally Posted by WillysJeepMan
The "superior" hardware of the Fire TV is in support of games. If one is not going to play games (and who seriously wants to play Android games on their TV?) then there are no benefits to that hardware.
I have a Roku 3 and Plex.
In what way is "Fire TV such a clear choice it's almost unfair"?
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You could drop games from the device and the extra grunt supplied by the cpu, graphics processing and memory increase is going to affect playback, load times and buffering ability, unless Amazon really screwed things up somehow. I'm not wowed by voice recognition usually, but if it works it may be a nice boon over the virtual keyboard. Throw in things like additional connectivity (the optical audio seems redundant, though) and comparable content (with fair reason to believe it's going to grow), all at the same price as the Roku 3 and the burden of "why" falls on the Roku. Imagine the specifications were swapped. The Fire would be dead in the water, imo.
Those Fire TV specs aren't impressive, per se. They're relatively impressive, but combined with Amazon's clout for content, at the same price it's enough. Roku can, and should match the processing specs. Roku needs to up their game.
They've been the best option for $100 streaming content for a while, despite their annoying game of bouncing between connectivity features each gen. They can't sit on their laurels, as it were, anymore, and I think this is going to be a very good thing for Roku fans.
side note: I'm a bit skeptical of Amazon's claim of better audio processing. They list Dolby Digital Plus as a feature, but I thought the Roku already had DD+.