Amazon Fire TV is a tiny box you connect to your HDTV. It's the easiest way to enjoy over 250,000 TV episodes and movies on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and HBO NOW, plus games, music, and more.
With voice search, simply say the name of what you want to watch and start enjoying in seconds
2 GB of memory, dedicated GPU, 1080p HD video, Dolby Audio surround sound, and Android-based Fire OS
Fast quad-core processor and expandable USB storage for playing best-selling games like Minecraft, Game of Thrones, Crossy Roads, and more
No more waiting for your movies and shows to buffer, ASAP learns what movies and shows you like so they start instantly
Fire TV lets you fling your favorite apps to your TV to free up your small screen for other uses. Or mirror your phone or tablet to your TV.
Amazon Prime customers get unlimited access to popular movies and TV shows with Prime Instant Video, including The HBO Collection and original shows like Transparent, plus Prime Music
Compatible with high-definition TVs with HDMI capable of 1080p or 720p at 60/50Hz, including popular HDCP-compatible models from these manufacturers: Hitachi, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, NEC, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Vizio, Westinghouse
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
UPDATE TO MY REVIEW: If I'm able to help you please mark my review accordingly ;)
What is the best smart tv add-on for you? The answer is not that difficult to come to actually...It all depends on what you're primary use will be; will you use this in a child's bedroom or your living room? Will you be playing games, watching movies or listening to music mostly? Are you wanting to geek out with the TV device or just watch some TV?
Once you have that question answered you're able to narrow down the options and you quickly realize how little time you actually spend watching TV in your bedroom and how something like the Roku 2 is more than adequate in an area like that or perhaps you realize that your Grandma has no idea how to even pronounce the word 'Nexus'. Whatever the case it's always good to take a quick look at what all of your options are...staples like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Pandora are practically embedded into everything or available on most modern devices so I'm not even going to bother talking about those types of things, instead I'd like to show you some other ingenious options available on this top end home theater must have.
-Amazon Fire TV-
The Amazon Fire TV is kind of a tongue twister; try to say it five times really fast. The currently $79 Android device does tout some heavy specs under the hood and was quite honestly one of the most underrated electronics this year, this is mainly due to the use of Amazon's Fire OS overlay on top of Android 4.4...the interface is actually really easy to use for someone older but it does leave those of us who are not older in a pickle in terms of customization and personalization, if those things are important to you.
Upon first glance the sleek user interface sort of glows with it's subtle minimalist design and invites you to play with it, the remote immediately kind of made me feel deceived for a second because I was hoping the circular directional pad would have the feature similar to the 'Apple TV' remote. (The feature would let you scroll through pages in a circular motion with your thumb very organically.) Alas, it did not...moving on though the microphone feature adds a really cool touch, I will say that I NEVER use it but it's cool on lazy days.
The feel of the remote control in my hand made for a very ergonomic and comfortable experience, the set top box was packaged very nicely and was extremely simple to turn on and setup. There is almost nothing to gripe about if you are not a very tech savvy person the entire setup process was simple and very straightforward.
We recently had purchased Amazon Prime at the time of purchase so browsing through the abundant catalog of free to view Prime stuff was actually pretty fun and truly a varietal of content.
Gaming is actually decent, not perfect yet but that truly could change with a few tweaks to the Amazon Fire OS from the manufacturer on the Android device. I was able to hookup my traditional wired Xbox 360 controller that I had lying around in a box under my bed and get to gaming with that as well, very cool! If you are adventurous you can install Android application files directly from .APK files and install applications not intended for the Amazon Fire TV...because Android is the base of the device this generally will never harm your device if you are careful and proceed with caution. There are many tutorials on the web that show you some very neat things you can "sideload" onto your Amazon Fire TV...you can even hookup your Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive if you'd like with this option. In this instance particularly I happened to install some video game emulators and play some Super Nintendo and PSP (Playstation Portable) Games using the aforementioned .APK files and some files I found 'legally' with the help of my good friend Google. The other sort of cool secret, not-so-secret thing is that you can also install a bittorrent client like uTorrent on the Amazon Fire TV and download things through that means as well. Truly this device has some limitations but at the time of purchase we paid $99 for something that is very capable and really sort of future proof for the time being.
Media is in abundance all around, you have Plex, Pandora, Hulu Plus, Netflix, Pluto.TV and anything else Android that you want to see on the big screen. I had no trouble finding something to watch using the bundled interface, I only wish I could do things the simple standard stuff like change colors and add apps to a designated bookmarked area. Other than that the automated suggestions are great and usually spot on.
Just know that this is a very capable device and while you may not really need all that beef inside the box that at one point the Android update may just make the older more slower hardware choke inadvertently. This doesn't seem to be the case with the Android updates but it sure is something I've noticed with most Apple product...updates intended to fix newer functionality end up breaking everything else. This was truly one of the most quality Android devices I've ever owned, hands down.
We need a favorites tab, I'm a tactile person and I like to select the app by hand manually and I found it a little silly to not have the option to put apps in a manner that I get to designate. I hooked up my Xbox 360 USB gamepad and it WORKED! Woo Hoo, you can use it to browse the menus and play games just like the official controller would work...most boxes disable that function to gouge the customer and Amazon was cool enough to leave the driver working for gamepads. I used Plex mostly and was impressed with the speed and response with load times...3D films worked as well via Plex.
HOW IT STACKS UP: My dilemma is that I have a Vizio Co-Star and I love how the included Universal Remote can effortlessly control my cable box, sound bar, as well as the Co-Star it self...the Co-Star also has dual HDMI so I don't have to switch inputs to watch regular cable, I feel kind of blah about the overall utility and versatility of the Amazon Fire TV...it feels like they released a half baked idea, it works well but it could have changed TV in the living room if they just asked customers for real input while putting it together. It's better than a Roku 3 in the speed and interface.
I only wish that Time Warner would release the TWC TV app for the Amazon Fire TV! Then I could ditch the Roku 3 altogether, the TWC TV app let's us watch TV and On Demand anywhere we have a Roku with a nice user interface, Amazon please solicit Time Warner to release a similar app for your device, that would be amazing!
Bottom Line: I might return it and wait for Amazon to do what they did with the Kindle Fire...they release a new iteration like every 3 months it seems, this is a beautiful device but it needs a little tweaking before it can earn a place in my entertainment center. I have a feeling Amazon will fix these issues, but they are hardware and not so much software so be forewarned that it's not going to be the all-in-one solution you've been looking for.
There are very good amount of reviews written by Amazon community members who are very thoughtful by sharing their views on this product and I must agree with them that this streaming media player is geared towards one main goal that is to get 'Amazon content' to your TV at lightning speeds! - Kudos to the engineers and developers on this amazing piece of hardware & extremely clever software programming delivering a product that is 'user friendly' and very well presented & executed - Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
The quad core 1.7Ghz Snapdragon processor combined with dedicated Adreno 320 GPU shows its `raw power' when you navigate screens & view content. It is by far (according to my experience) the world's fastest streaming media player till date in terms of hardware specs. Everything is `snappy fast' and instantaneous when viewing content from Amazon and other apps. There are no streaming delays or wait loading content ever. I must admit that after using more than a year with Prime Subscription running on discontinued Logitech revue (Google TV)'s poor Amazon Video application I consider this Amazon Fire TV light year ahead of the game in all respects. For people who are still hanging on to Logitech Revue my suggestion is give up on Logitech Revue and switch to FireTV. Trust me you not regret it.
The voice search capability is by far the best I have seen in any platform till date and I must admit it works extremely well for searching Amazon content. I hope to see the feature extended to popular apps in the future making it even more productive.
The FireOS which is actually a very heavily tweaked Android OS but credit must go to Amazon's software developers for customizing Android OS for making it extremely user friendly while still keeping it open for tweakers to side-load unsupported/untested/unofficial applications if needed via ADB. Amazon has made this legal & official and is documented on Amazon's developer portal if you want to get third-party apps side-loaded.
The `official' third party application support currently available on Amazon's web portal is not that great but IMHO will improve over time since this hardware is capable of doing much more than what it is currently being used for. The first application that got my attention was `PLEX'. Installing PLEX app gives you the capability to stream all your local media files while still maintaining the same look and feel of the excellent UI. You will however have to dedicate a PC to run their server software for trans-coding unsupported file formats but using PLEX gives you beautiful backdrops & information that is worth the effort for dedicating a PC just for media streaming. PLEX also opens up the world for 1000's of channels that is currently not available for Amazon FireTV.
You can side-load XBMC media center (XBMC 13.0 Gotham for Android (ARM))if you are familiar with can also give you similar experience like PLEX without having to dedicate a transcoding server on your home network but XBMC still needs a lot of polishing & skins to match what Amazon FireTV UI has to offer. I am sure developers of XBMC will come up with an official app soon to take advantage of the raw hardware Amazon FireTV has to offer.
The YouTube for FireTV application is also one of the best that one can get in any platform making this streaming media experience a joy to use. The Dolby Digital Audio out from FireTV makes the video and audio experience very good. YouTube app needs some polishing but the instant playback of video makes up for all the current bugs & short falls.
You *do* need a decent broadband internet connection (3Mbps or better) for best content streaming experience. Most of us already have a good internet connection that we already pay for every month and barely use it. Once you have a good internet connection there are plethora of channels that you can spend hours browsing & viewing them at lightning speeds. There are popular channels like Netflix,Hulu Plus etc; etc; I personally do not own a Netflix account but it is there if you like and will get better over time with many more channels to come as content providers rush to capitalize on Amazon FireTV's excellent raw hardware power to deliver their content alongside with Amazon's content.
Amazon fire TV is great for what's worth for watching Prime instant videos & occasional gaming on big screen TV. Voice search is very good too using the included remote but there is one issue that being the fact that the remote is 'Bluetooth' not 'IR' so that means you cannot teach your programmable universal remote with the command sets from Amazon Fire TV remote. I have been trying various methods to use my universal remote which I use to control all my audio/video pile of Equipment of my home theater to seamlessly work with Amazon Fire TV but not an easy task since the remote is 'Bluetooth' based.
After doing some research on-line I found that certain 'IR remotes' which were designed to be used with Microsoft Media center (MCE) somehow do work but only certain picky types of MCE IR remotes. I took a gamble and bought this Ortek Media Center MCE PC Remote Control and Infrared Receiver since it looked pretty much same (Especially the controller) and I can confirm that this works with Amazon Fire TV and I was able to use the included remote and program my other universal remote all the basic commands one needs to navigate Amazon fire TV's user interface. The only thing that does not work with the IR remote is the closed caption choice (CC) button which is no big deal! the other benefit of using IR remote is that you can put the Amazon Fire TV to sleep by pressing the power button which even the original Bluetooth remote from Amazon cannot do it :)
There are so many good content to view from Amazon Instant video with Prime membership and completely commercial free that Amazon fireTV has to offer that by paying yearly $99 for Prime membership (which has other benefits like free 2 day shipping) and one time $99 dollar investment on this streaming media player you can `cut the cord' from your cable company for good.
I have owned several streaming media players in my life over the years but this is by far the best $99 I have spent on a streaming media player till date and I love it.