If you are planning on buying a television soon you may see a new option in stores – new Amazon-branded televisions. According to reports, Amazon will release its own televisions in the US as soon as October. We’ve known for some time the e-commerce giant will be releasing their own TVs, designed by the same research and development team responsible for the company’s other products like Echo smart speakers and the Kindle e-readers.
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That being said, the hardware is all sourced from third party providers. The TV models expected to launch this year have been built in partnership with other OEMs like TCL, who has a large TV business of their own. The in0house team is reportedly also working on another TV built from the ground up by the company itself, but it isn’t known when these TVs will hit the market.
The TVs that are launching this year will, naturally, be powered by Alexa – Amazon’s digital assistant, becoming ever more ubiquitous. A remaining unknown is whether or not it will also be running on Fire TV software – used in its smart TV casting devices – which would be our assumption. Some other TVs that the company sells from other manufacturers already runs Fire TV.
Fire OS is a forked version of Android which Amazon uses on its Kindle, Echo and Fire TV devices. It allowed Amazon to launch their own app store, most prominent on its Kindle tablets.
The Amazon TV range expected to launch first will mostly focus on the large TV market, expected to range between 55-inches and 75-inches.
It is yet another hardware segment that Amazon is entering with its own offering, aiming to cut costs with its massively optimised delivery networks. How their TVs will compare in quality and usability remains to be seen.
