Amazon to launch Kindle TV set-top box this fall: Report

This is a nice start to the blog. Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon will be adding another hardware device to its portfolio in the form of a Kindle TV set-top box. This connected smart TV box will rival the likes of Google TV, Apple TV, Roku and more. There are no clear details available right now, but the work for this rumoured TV box is going on in Amazon's Lab126, where the company makes its hardware products.
If the Bloomberg report is correct, the retail giant has also gathered an impressive set of people to build this set-top box. "The project is being run by Malachy Moynihan, a former vice president of emerging video products at Cisco (CSCO) who worked on the networking company’s various consumer video initiatives. Moynihan also spent nine years at Apple (AAPL) during the 1980s and 1990s. Among the other hardware engineers working at Lab126 with considerable experience making set-top boxes are Andy Goodman, formerly a top engineer at TiVo and Vudu, and Chris Coley, a former hardware architect at ReplayTV, one of Silicon Valley’s first DVR companies," Bloomberg noted in the report.

AndroidOS.in speculates that Amazon might use Android as the base for this TV set-top box as it would make sense for the company to add the existing app store on the box and it would not need to create a platform from scratch.
Amazon already has Instant Video app for Google TV, which can easily be ported to Kindle TV platform to work with the company's custom version of Android.

With the company's increasing portfolio of video content including the company's original content ambitions, Kindle TV set-top box makes perfect sense. To remind you, Amazon recently recently released pilots for 14 original series like Alpha House and Zombieland and a select few of these - based on users' feedback - will be extended to full seasons.