Amazon Fire TV Can Now Stream Directly to Cochlear Implants

Amazon announced today that Fire TV can now stream audio directly to some cochlear implants, a first, giving those with hearing loss an amazing new option.

“For the first time, people with hearing loss can stream sound from their Amazon smart TVs directly to their Cochlear hearing implants via the open-source Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (ASHA) protocol,” Amazon’s Tomas Kellner writes in the announcement post. “The work builds on Amazon’s collaboration with the hearing aid company, Starkey, and represents another step in an effort to help make entertainment more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.”

This new solution is a collaboration between Amazon and Cochlear, and it lets Cochlear implant users more directly enjoy content from Prime Video, Netflix, and other streaming services as well as local TV networks. The system bypasses the implant’s microphones and streams audio from Fire TV directly into the implants without noise and echo degradation.

This capability is available now for those with Nucleus 8, Nucleus 7, Nucleus Kanso 2, and Baha 6 Max sound processors, and it works with the Fire TV Omni QLED series, Fire TV Omni series, Fire TV 4-series, Fire TV Cube (2nd and 3rd Gen).

Amazon Fire TV devices can also pair with hearing aids. You can learn more here.