Yesterday, Amazon announced its newest streaming adapter: The new Fire TV Stick HD, which will be released at the end of the month, is being touted as the company’s “slimmest and most portable stick to date.” The stick also improves over its predecessor with Wi-Fi 6 support, and is supposed to be 30 percent faster than the prior model.
One detail left out of the official announcement: The new Fire TV Stick HD runs Vega, Amazon’s new Linux-based operating system, as the company confirmed after I reached out yesterday. Amazon has been quietly working on Vega for years, and began using it for its Echo Show smart displays before debuting it on a first Fire TV stick last fall.
That device, the Fire TV Stick 4K Select, was launched with little fanfare during Amazon’s fall devices event in September. And with app support for Vega still lagging, Amazon launched the Select stick with an unusual trick: To help publishers transition to the new device, the company is running some Android apps in the cloud, and then streaming them to the device.
The launch of the Select stick was met with some backlash from a small but vocal group of Fire TV users who bemoaned the fact that it didn’t let them sideload Android apps anymore – something that’s especially popular with people looking to run rogue IPTV apps for free access to pay TV content.
As this week’s launch shows, Amazon remains undeterred by such criticism. In fact, the company seems intent on continuing its transition to Vega: Amazon plans to launch all future Fire TV sticks with Vega, I’ve been told by multiple sources with knowledge of those plans. The company declined to comment on its Fire TV roadmap.
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Fire TV Stick photo courtesy of Amazon.