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After the Fire Phone’s not so excellent performance and Amazon’s staggering losses in the September quarter, the tech giant has unveiled the Fire TV stick, a media-streaming device which plugs into a TV set much like a USB stick and lets users browse anything from music to videos from Netflix, Hulu and Pandora.

The Fire TV stick seeks to extend its reach into customer’s digital lives by streaming content from Amazon’s Prime service, as well as other providers such as Showtime, Spotify or Netflix. According to Amazon’s announcements, the device will be released on the 19^th of November, although eager users are free to order it immediately.

Costing $39, the Fire TV Stick plugs into the high-definition port of your TV and comes equipped with a remote control. It mirrors media content and application from phones or tablets in addition to streaming content, Amazon statements said.

With the introduction of the Fire TV stick, it’s clear that competition with home-media services is stepping up. Following Amazon’s introduction of the Fire TV box this year, the Fire TV stick seems to attempt to compete with Google’s plug-in device, the Chromecast, which retails at a price of $35 and tops Amazon’s electronics best sellers. The Chromecast has also topped other Roku Inc. and Apple Inc. offerings.

“The Fire TV Stick will be a natural progression of the Fire TV,”

Morningstar Inc. analyst, RJ Hottovy said in a statement.

“They will have more success among core Amazon Prime users, but it will be more difficult switching customers away.”

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick is able to directly sync with the Fire TV box and is expected to drive more $99 annual subscriptions to Prime, thus offering free of charge fast shipping as well as instant video streaming access.

The tech giant is offering a 30-day membership to Prime free of charge for every Fire TV Stick purchase. In addition, current Prime members also have bonuses: for the first two days, they can preorder the Fire TV stick for just $19.

Amazon describes its device as being more powerful than Google’s Chromecast, however, after last week’s debacle of an earnings announcement, when the Fire Phone proved to be a disappointment, many question whether the company’s attempts at adding more products would indeed bring innovation to its future.

The tech giant’s shares have already gone down 0.5 percent on Monday morning, indicating that the market no longer trusts Amazon as it did in the past.

Amazon just announced its third quarter earnings today and the retailer giant is surely navigating in shallow waters. In its earnings conference call, Amazon reported a third quarter loss of $544 million, compared to the $25 million losses announced in the third quarter of 2013. Who’s the culprit you would ask? None other than the Fire Phone, some company reps report. According to reports, the eccentric smartphone wasn’t as hot as expected, causing the company a $170 million write-down in addition to supplier commitment costs.

It’s true that very few had expected the Amazon Fire Phone to be as great a trailblazer as the iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy. What is surprising, though, is that it performed as terribly as it did in the market. In fact, the retailer giant is not a newborn where mobile devices are concerned and although smartphones are slightly different from ereaders or tablets, it still doesn’t explain why the Fire Phone did so badly. The device itself is no underdog, porting the basic hardware that normally comprises any high-end smartphone.

What many would blame is the Fire Phone’s exclusivity to one (and just one) carrier. While such a stunt could have been pulled off by a highly popular and more established smartphone producer, Amazon shouldn’t have attempted to shut out others out from the device. And it’s true that when you’re just starting out, you might experience some issues when deciding to get in bed with only one carrier, be it AT&T. The Fire Phone simply couldn’t solve the adoption problems even when the price was brought down to just one U.S. dollar.

However, there are some who believe that the Fire Phone had an even bigger problem. While other Amazon devices focus on one particular use case (and that is precisely where they perform excellently), the Fire Phone isn’t much of anything. It does good, but so do countless other models and as a reading device, it’s not as good to begin with. The Fire Phone was designed to be intimately connected to Amazon’s selling business, and although people love shopping, buying a smartphone dedicated just for online shopping simply doesn’t seem reasonable.

There are some notable features that the Fire Phone also has, for instance, the Dynamic Perspective, however, these fancy gimmicks only sugar coat the device’s clear lack of vision.

And when you’re planning to buy a smartphone, the Fire Phone strikes one as being too expensive, looked down and as having poor specs. Not to mention no Google Play.

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