I talked to Amazon about the Ember Artline, and the end of "confusing" Fire TV branding

When Amazon announced the Ember Artline TV, it was keen to put the focus on the new matte finish and artwork that the TV would bring to people's lounges and living rooms. That's well and good, but, in some ways, the more important announcement was that when the TV arrived, it would also mark a massive branding change for Amazon.

That's right – Fire TVs aren't Fire TVs any more; or are they? Well, as it happens, now every TV that Amazon makes itself will be an Ember TV, drawing more of a clear line between 'a TV that Amazon makes that runs on Fire TV' as compared to 'the Fire TV ecosystem and software experience', if that makes sense. No more Fire TV Fire TVs, basically.

At an Amazon briefing last week, I was interested to question Emma Gilmartin, Director of Fire TV for Europe, about the change and what it means for consumers and customers. She explained that while this is a big tweak from Amazon's perspective, it's one that should result in less "confusion" for regular folks.

"I think there's a reason why we've moved away from just calling everything Fire TV – because Fire TV is, in itself, a user experience. And it's now on partner-branded TVs, on our streaming sticks, and our own-party TVs. So it becomes confusing for customers when everything is just Fire TV."

That's a rare level of honesty from a huge corporation like Amazon, albeit at a time when it can afford to say that its past branding was odd, since it's now changing the system. When I asked whether there was any anxiety internally about the swap, I got a bullish response, too, with basically no sense that there was risk to the name swap.

For my money, Ember's a pretty clean name, and the continuity of the "fire" image does make a smooth transition pretty likely. Plus, it's not like the Fire TV brand is going anywhere – it's still the umbrella under which the Ember hardware lineup will sit. In fact, Amazon has another little hardware launch to talk about, too, in the form of a new £40 Fire TV Stick HD.

Glimartin described the stick as "super, super fast", and I can attest that in person, the 30% boost in speed it's been given is impressive, especially given it's entry-level stuff. A bunch of recent Fire TV Sticks will also be getting the OS update that Amazon's rolling out, which should give them all a roughly 30% boost, too, so it's a great time to be a stick owner.

As Gilmartin put it, "the team took the opportunity to completely rewrite the code, which allows them to iterate much faster, and allowed us to scale and do different things in the future". That might mean that future updates are more frequently deployed, making for better future-proofing in the long run.

I've always been curious about which of Amazon's sticks sells the best, since there are plenty to pick from, and while Gilmartin wouldn't be drawn on any actual figures, she confirmed that from Amazon's point of view, there's no real drive to consolidate its lineup into fewer options.

"We also have this debate about how many sticks – but for some people, a jump of £10 or £15 is a lot, so for some people the Stick HD is perfect, [while] some people want to get the best, with the best Wi-Fi and connectivity". Crucially, as she puts it, "people are buying all of the sticks", so there's no single one that's likely to get chopped any time soon.

Regardless, the big Ember branding change is probably enough upheaval for one financial quarter at least, and Amazon will doubtless have multiple eyes on its analytics the moment it makes the swap. We'll be fascinated to see how it lands, too.