(photo: pocketlint.com)

The rumors have been fast and furious over the last few months. One thing we knew for sure was that with Amazon’s video delivery service and other media services they were planing a new set top box. This morning they released the Amazon Fire set top box and game controllers at an event in New York City.

The Amazon Fire can do everything most set top boxes can do including streaming movies, photos, and even playing games directly on the users television. The device is a direct competitor to Apple’s Apple TV, the Roku, Boxie and other set top boxes, although most haven’t yet incorporated games.

Amazon has entered the hardware space with it’s Kindle Fire tablets and now the Fire set top box because they wanted to offer their own hardware to compliment their streaming services, instead of letting competitors eat all of the hardware pie. Of course the world’s largest e-commerce site will still sell competing products, but the Amazon Fire, like the Kindle Fire tablet line, just means more profit for them.

Pocketlint has a complete gallery of pictures of the new device along with a preliminary hands on review.

In the content department the Amazon Fire has most of the usual suspects including Hulu, Netflix, Disney, Showtime, the WWE Network, The NBA Network and many others. Gizmodo reports that HBO Go is  not part of the debut offering. Of course it also has access to Amazon’s video library as well.

Speaking of Amazon content services, the company also announced a new Amazon Games Studio that will develop games for the Fire set top box and the Fire game controller that looks like an OnLive or Xbox controller. EA, Disney and other big gaming publishers are already slated to release games for the Amazon ecosystem.

The Amazon Fire is available today, here at amazon.com for just $99. The gaming controller can be purchased for $39