![]() ![]() For that, you need to click on each entry, which shows that Moon requires a Showtime subscription (which Amazon sells), Arrival is a rental (also sold by Amazon), and Blade is on Hulu. Here’s a basic example of where Fire TV falls short: On my home screen, there’s a row called “Science Fiction,” with films like Moon, Arrival, Ready Player One, and Blade, but the home screen shows no information about where those films are available. ![]() Scroll down the Fire TV home screen, and you’ll get recommendations on what to watch. Like Amazon, they all try to provide a single menu for content instead of making you jump into lots of different apps, but they’re more organized, more customizable, and less biased toward certain sources of content. At the very least, it’s more interesting than Roku’s approach, which makes no attempts to recommend anything other than free, ad-supported video.īut as I wrote in my Roku Ultra review, devices like the new Chromecast with Google TV, TiVo Stream 4K, and Apple TV 4K are all better at dealing with too many streaming services. Now, I’m on record for having liked this interface in the past. The Fire TV home screen, prior to a planned late-2020 overhaul. Beneath the top-level menu and featured content, you’ll get a row for recent apps and recently-viewed Prime content, a sortable row of favorite apps, and then a sprawling list of recommendations with a heavy emphasis on Amazon’s Prime Video and IMDb TV services. Instead, it’s the same old chaos that’s defined the Fire TV experience since late 2016. Back when Amazon announced its new Fire TV Sticks, it showed off a new menu system that’s more streamlined than the current one.īut that’s not the menu Amazon is shipping today. This is the part of the review where things get a little squishy. The Fire TV Stick Lite remote has a button for Amazon’s Channel Guide, which offers quick access to live channels in certain apps. The Lite model does have its own unique remote control button that launches the Fire TV Channel Guide, which displays a grid guide for supported services such as AT&T TV Now, Philo, Sling TV, YouTube TV, and Amazon’s Fire TV Recast DVR. But for most people, that’s not a worthy trade-off, especially because you can always use the remote’s Alexa voice control button to open the guide or tune directly to specific channels. ![]() The only other difference on the spec sheet is on the audio front: Where the Fire TV Stick supports decode for Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital/Digital+, and DTS, the Fire TV Stick Lite only supports passthrough for those formats. (You’ll need to step up to Amazon’s $50 Fire TV Stick 4K for those features.) Jared Newman / IDGĪmazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K (pictured at rear) is a bit larger than the identical-looking Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Liteīoth Fire TV Sticks can also supply 1080p video and support high dynamic range in the HDR10, HDR10+, or HLG formats, though neither support 4K video or Dolby Vision HDR. Roku devices tend to feel a little faster-if only because they’re better at showing partial menus or loading icons instead of just momentarily freezing up-but in terms of loading times, it’s pretty much a wash. Performance-wise, they’re a big improvement over the previous Fire TV Stick (which first launched in 2016), with much shorter loading times and less herky-jerky scrolling through menus, and they bring speed roughly up to par with other budget streamers. While the two sticks have no extra ports beyond micro-USB for power, a cheap USB-OTG cable would allow for thumb drives and other USB accessories. Both plug directly into your TV’s HDMI port (a short extension cable is included if you need more clearance around the TV), and both have a quad-core 1.7GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and dual-band Wi-Fi 5 support. Held next to one another, the new Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite look identical.
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