You may recall the indie-created Ouya console, the first mainstream attempt to create a $99 media center that also functioned as a basic gaming console. Ouya is more or less received as a let-down, as the console has very few exclusive titles and aging hardware. But today Amazon announced their very own gaming console/media center, named Amazon Fire TV.
The Fire TV is a $99 box that you can connect to your television, available starting today from Amazon. In addition to having support for video streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu, the Fire TV is a basic video games console. Amazon announced that Fire TV would have full support for video games such as Asphalt 8, Sev Zero - and our favorite - Minecraft.
Minecraft on the Fire TV isn't actually a new port, instead it appears to be Minecraft Pocket Edition. This would make sense, considering that the Fire TV runs Amazon's custom version of Android known as Fire OS. Mojang was at the press event (Lydia Winters, the Director of Fun at Mojang, is on the right), showing off Minecraft PE on the Fire TV.
It's hard to tell if the version of Minecraft PE in the picture is actually 0.9.0 or not, but there does appear to be icons for the Fire TV's controllers in the bottom-right corner (similar to how Minecraft on consoles works). Honestly, I'm really curious to see if this means that Minecraft PE will get controller support on Android (at least), because if so it's time for me to break out my MOGA controller.
UPDATE: Jens, the main MCPE developer, posted on Reddit regarding controller support on Android/iOS: "This is a step towards it but we are not there yet. We should have a more general solution around 1.0.0/1.1.0 when we have had time to work a bit more on it." Guess I have to put back my MOGA...
Source: Instagram, Amazon Fire TV