fireplace tv, Meet IMDb: Amazon’s television Streamers are now specialists On Actors, Characters, And music

When Amazon unveiled its fireplace tv streaming video box a year ago, its big defining characteristic used to be the power to look via talking into its far flung regulate. however with devices, (April 15, 2015)’s defining function has a technique of becoming these days’s guidelines item. remaining week, Roku offered a new model of its Roku 3 box that allows you to…search via talking into its remote control.

Now Amazon is rolling out a brand new model of the instrument for the $ninety nine hearth television and $39 hearth tv Stick which, once again, gives them a functionality now not on hand on Roku and other rivals. that’s X-Ray, a form of interactive annotations that tell you in regards to the actors, characters, and tune in movies and television displays to be had via Amazon fast Video.

X-Ray originated as a feature in the company’s Kindle e-readers in 2011 and then showed up for movies and television on its fire drugs in 2012. The film and tv version is powered with the aid of IMDb, which Amazon has owned in view that 1998. until now, you’ve gotten been in a position to apply it to a hearth tablet while watching video on a tv equipped with fire television. however now, the same information is built into the standalone fire television experience.

Factoids On Demand

When a film or episode is X-Ray-enabled, urgent pause or the up button brings up an overlay of X-Ray information; pressing the up button again puts X-Ray into full-reveal mode. you could browse round to view trivialities; jump to other productions which actors in the scene have regarded in, along with their biographies; evaluate history data on characters; and determine songs. that you could also navigate the film or exhibit by using jumping from scene to scene.

All of that is assuming that no matter you are looking at has X-Ray information in any respect. Amazon is somewhat cagey about what number of films and displays it’s enabled, announcing handiest that it’s “tens of lots,” and that the corporate makes a speciality of probably the most-watched gadgets. the process of weaving X-Ray knowledge into a manufacturing entails both computing device learning and human eyes and ears, so the company can not just flip a change to make it occur.

Judging from the time I spent with a pre-unlock model of the brand new function on a fireplace television box, you could suppose that X-Ray is on hand for Amazon’s personal original series (comparable to transparent) and for recent, high-profile productions. but after I regarded for it among the many motion pictures I’ve offered from Amazon—a lot of which might be 30, 40, or extra years outdated—X-Ray was scarce. Even classics such as Dr. Strangelove didn’t have it—as a minimum yet.

X-Ray isn’t a sport changer, but it’s a lucrative feature that Roku, Apple television, and different competitors can be laborious-pressed to check, in view that it is so depending on the trove of information in Amazon’s personal IMDb. And it ensures that even if Amazon rapid Video is on hand on a bevy of units—together with Roku—it is the hearth television version that offers the richest, most fully Amazonian experience.