Amazon unveils new Fire TV streaming video box

Amazon.com is officially entering the streaming video settop box competition.

The online retailer-turned tech company and content provider announced its new Amazon Fire TV product today at an event in New York. The $99 is available for order now on Amazon.com.

The 0.7-inch thin WiFi-supporting settop box streams 1080P high definition and connects to your TV via HDMI. It comes with a remote that lets you use voice to search for content; available separately is a $39.99 controller for playing video games.

"Tiny box, huge specs, tons of content, incredible price — people are going to love Fire TV," Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "Voice search that actually works means no more typing on an alphabet grid. Our exclusive new ASAP feature predicts the shows you'll want to watch and gets them ready to stream instantly. And our open approach gives you not just Amazon Instant Video and Prime Instant Video, but also Netflix, Hulu Plus, and more. On Fire TV you can watch Alpha House and House of Cards."

Amazon hopes Fire TV gives it an advantage over streaming competitor Netflix, which does not sell its own connected devices but is available on more than 1,000 devices including smart TVs, Blu-ray Disc players and video game consoles.

Amazon "sees the millions of set top boxes that they sell, they know this is a hot market," said analyst James McQuivey, author of Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation. McQuivey was among several analysts and tech journalists attending the event, providing updates on Twitter about Amazon's announcement.

The new settop box, unveiled by Peter Larsen, the company's vice president in charge of Kindle, is "very thin, about the size of a small piece of toast," McQuivey said. And the Fire TV name "makes good sense, builds on the brand," he added.

BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield posted that the Fire TV settop box promises to be three times as fast as competing products. For Netflix, which is a competitor in terms of streaming video content, Amazon's announcement is good news in a way.

The "more IP-enabled TVs the better for #netflix - makes it easier to get to their service on the big screen," he noted on Twitter.

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Mozilla under fire for new CEO’s anti-gay past

It’s been a rough week for Mozilla.

Seven days after naming its new CEO, the Mountain View-based corporation best known for developing the popular web browser Firefox has yet to put out the fires it developed for placing Brendan Eich at the company’s helm.

Though Eich’s professional background could color anyone impressed (he created JavaScript, one of the most popular programming languages on the Web, and co-founded mozilla.org), his personal background has one, glaring, black mark for a company committed to the principle of equality: Six years ago, Eich donated $1,000 to the campaign for Proposition 8, California’s now-defunct ban on same-sex marriage.

The donation itself isn’t breaking news; it first became public in 2012 when Eich was still the company’s chief technology officer, and one year before the U.S. Supreme Court hammered the final nail in Prop 8’s coffin. But his elevation to the top job at Mozilla last Monday sparked a renewed backlash, one with public condemnations from employees and resignations from half the company’s board.

“As a gay couple who were unable to get married in California until recently, we morally cannot support a foundation that would not only leave someone with hateful views in power, but will give them a promotion and put them in charge of the entire organization,” wrote Hampton Catlin, CTO of Moovweb and CEO of Rarebit, which he co-founded with his husband, Michael Catlin. The couple pulled their software company’s apps from the Firefox Marketplace in protest of Eich’s appointment.

Adding to the company’s PR nightmare, three of Mozilla’s six board members —  including two former CEOs — resigned in the wake of Eich’s hiring. According to The Wall Street Journal, the board members did not step down over political views, but because they wanted to see an outside candidate with experience in the mobile industry take over the chief executive slot.

Many Mozillians took to Twitter to voice their disapproval.

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