In case you needed more evidence that a new Amazon Fire TV is on the way, well… we’ve got some.

As AFTV News notes, not only did a device that seems to be a 2nd-gen Fire TV box hit the FCC this week, but new gamepad and remote control accessories also showed up at the FCC website recently.

aftv ui
The new Fire TV is expected to feature support for 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth and Ethernet. It has a microSD card slot and USB port. And unlike the original Fire TV, it’ll support 4K video.

As for the new remote and gamepad? There appears to be one major difference between the new accessories and the versions available for the original Fire TV: the new gamepad and remote seem to support 802.11a/g WiFi, but not Bluetooth.

This could mean you’ll connect the controllers to a Fire TV over your home’s wireless network rather than via Bluetooth — and that could lead to a faster connection and support for the transfer of more information. This could come in handy if, for example, the new models feature headphone jacks, allowing you to stream sound from a Fire TV to a remote control so you can listen without disturbing other people in the room.

That’s just a guess though: the FCC documents don’t make any mention of audio capabilities.

There are still a few other important things we don’t know about the new Fire TV, including when it will launch and how much it will cost. But if I had to guess, I’d say soon, and for less than the $149 starting price of the new Apple TV.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,543 other subscribers

4 replies on “Next-gen Amazon Fire TV remote, gamepad hit the FCC”

  1. I wonder if latency would be higher with Wifi, compared to bluetooth? My guess is it would be more inconsistent with Wifi, especially if the router prioritizes packets. Unless it’s like the Roku remote and uses WiFi Direct.

    1. WiFi Direct is lower latency than standard bluetooth, but compared to Bluetooth LE i have no idea

    2. The Nvidia Shield TV went with a WiFI based controller to specifically cut down on the 20ms latency you get with bluetooth controllers. Typically a bluetooth controller has about 20ms of latency, WiFi direct has about 10ms ie half the latency.

      This is a good thing

Comments are closed.