Quick Summary
By running on Amazon's new Vega OS software, the Fire TV Stick Select is unlikely to support some of the major apps. But it turns out that's not a problem.
The answer, it seems, lies in the cloud.
Shortly before Amazon announced a new addition to its Fire TV Stick lineup, it was rumoured that the tech giant was about to ditch its long used and well tested Android-based software, Fire OS.
I therefore wrote a piece about how concerned I was about the move. Even though existing Fire TV devices wouldn't be affected, what would that mean for future streamers and televisions? After all, asking rival streaming services to build apps for a new, dedicated platform could prove tricky.
Just ask Huawei how things initially went when its Google Play Store ban was enforced.
It turned out the rumour was correct. During its October hardware event, Amazon announced its own new system, Vega OS, which is being used in the all-new Fire TV Stick Select. And app support is indeed said to be thin on the ground.
It's claimed that the likes of Netflix and Disney+ have not created native Vega OS apps, and the Select will therefore not have them installed on launch.
But it's also said that they will be available on the device despite that, and the solution is actually quite ingenious.
Will the Amazon Fire TV Stick Select support Netflix and Disney+
According to Lowpass, Amazon's new, inexpensive streaming stick will offer all of the same streaming services as current and former models – the ones that run on Fire OS.
That's because, instead of hosting them locally – ie. installed on the device – they will be streamed over the cloud. That includes the menus and all.
Currently, when you start Netflix on a Smart TV, for example, the app will load on your television, with all the metadata, artwork and details being populated from the internet but shown by the locally stored software. It's only when you click on something to watch that the show starts to stream.
Where the Fire TV Stick Select version will work differently is that the streaming starts as soon as you open the app. Every part of the process is hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services) servers elsewhere.
It's much like playing a cloud game through Xbox Cloud Gaming or Nvidia's GeForce Now – except latency is less important when it comes to watching video or interacting with a fairly basic menu. You aren't relying on split second actions.
The end user is unlikely to even notice the difference between opening Netflix natively or streaming the entire experience over the cloud. In many ways, this could and maybe should end up being the new normal.
Why will app streaming be better than local downloads?
In the case of the Fire TV Select, the main benefit of hosting unsupported apps in the cloud is obvious – software that wouldn't normally work on the platform can still be used. However, the implications of the technology goes further than that.
For starters, you can run fairly complicated software on a simple, inexpensive device. As long as its CPU is capable of receiving and playing 4K HDR (Dolby Vision) video and up to Dolby Atmos sound, it can handle any streamed app. It's the server at the other end doing the grunt work.
Game streaming is a perfect example – you can play Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K and at 120 frames per second, with full ray tracing and other high performance graphical settings on a 10 year old MacBook through GeForce Now (with the right subscription). Nvidia hosts the very best hardware its end, which runs the game, while the MacBook only needs to decode the video feed and send control codes in the other direction.
Another benefit is that your Fire TV streamer or television could have a much longer lifespan. There have been reports of older Smart TVs losing the likes of Netflix and, ironically, Amazon Prime Video because their processing isn't up to today's standards. But with cloud streaming front and back, apps can be updated at source – the demands to play the video stream remains the same.
In all honesty, I still need to test the Amazon Fire TV Stick Select myself to see just how well it handles the process. But just the concept already has me intrigued.
If it works as well as I suspect, it might be that rival streaming services and other app developers need never make dedicated Vega OS versions, and considering a Fire TV device is by its very nature, persistently connected to the internet, it seems almost a no-brainer that this could be the future for streaming devices full stop.
It might even drive their prices down.
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