What Tv Channel Apps Are On Amazon Fire Stick

Editors' Note: There is a new version of the Fire TV Stick available. Check out the Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Gen).

If you haven't moved up to a 4K TV yet, it's only logical that you don't need a 4K media streamer. In the non-4K field, the $39.99 Amazon Fire TV Stick is easily one of the best. It's a powerful little device that features Amazon's robust Fire TV platform and Alexa voice assistant. The remote has a built-in microphone for controlling the stick with Alexa voice commands, and it was upgraded to let you directly control your TV's power and volume. Despite a few omissions in streaming apps, the Fire TV Stick With Alexa Voice Remote easily offers enough in the way of features and value to make it an Editors' Choice for budget media streamers. Of course, if you do have a 4K TV, the Fire TV Stick 4K adds 4K HDR video support on top of everything else for just $10 more.

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Streaming Stick

The Fire TV Stick is just a hair wider than the previous model, at 3.4 by 1.1 by 0.5 inches (HWD), but otherwise looks identical. It's a plain black plastic rectangle with an HDMI plug on one end and a micro USB port on one side. As a stick intended to plug into the back of your television, it doesn't need to look impressive or have any real controls or display.

The new Alexa Voice Remote included with the Fire TV Stick is the same one found with the Fire TV Stick 4K and the Fire TV Cube. It keeps the same simple, flat black plastic wand design of the previous voice remote, but adds three new controls. To start with the basic design, the remote is dominated by a round direction pad with a large select button in the middle. A microphone button and pinhole mic sit above the pad, along with a new power button. Menu and playback controls sit below the navigation pad, with a volume rocker and mute button below them.

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The power, mute, and volume up/down buttons work with the infrared emitter on the front of the remote to control your TV directly. Once the Fire TV Stick determines the TV you're using (a mostly automated process you go through during setup that involves pointing the remote at your TV and making sure the volume slider appears on the screen), you can use the remote to turn your TV on and off, adjust the volume, or mute the TV. It won't completely control your TV with menu navigation or any other features, but just the ability to turn your TV on, start watching something on your Fire TV Stick, and tweak the volume as needed with the same remote is useful and welcome.

App and Accessories

You can use the Amazon Fire TV Remote app for Android and iOS if you prefer to control the Fire TV Stick with your smartphone or tablet. It's much simpler than the remote app used with Roku devices, mostly providing a touchpad for menu navigation, a handful of playback controls, a voice search function with your device's microphone, and (most useful if you need to enter login information) an onscreen keyboard. It doesn't offer private listening like the Roku app does, which streams audio through your smartphone or tablet so you can listen to what you're watching with a set of headphones plugged into it. Since the Fire TV Stick supports Bluetooth, however, you can simply pair a set of Bluetooth headphones directly for a similar function.

Besides the voice remote, the Fire TV Stick comes with a short HDMI extender cable (handy if the HDMI ports on your television are recessed), a micro USB cable, a USB power adapter, and a pair of AAA batteries for the remote. It's everything you need to start streaming media, short of the TV itself.

Fire TV OS

Amazon uses a heavily modified version of Android in the Fire TV Stick, the same as you'll find in all other Fire TV devices. It's similar to Android TV's interface, with large rows of icons showing apps and content, arranged in different categories like your most recent picks and suggested shows. It's visually friendly and easy to navigate.

Like other Fire TV devices, the Fire TV Stick uses a limited version of Amazon's app store rather than Google Play for all of its apps and services. Most major streaming services are available, including (of course) Amazon, Crunchyroll, HBO NOW, Hulu, Netflix, PlayStation Vue, Sling TV, Spotify, and YouTube. It's missing a few prominent services, though, like Google Play Movies & TV, Google Play Music, and Vudu, all of which are available on Roku.

As an Amazon product, Amazon Prime users get a lot of benefits baked into the Fire TV Stick, even before installing any apps. Videos on Amazon can be accessed directly from the stick's interface, so you can just jump into anything you want to watch (if it's on Prime). Prime Music also has a very large selection of albums available with your membership, and you can access the even bigger Amazon Music Unlimited library with an additional $7.99 monthly subscription.

Since it's still basically an Android device there are a few esoteric techniques for sideloading your own .apk files and installing any app you want (to varying success based on integration with the remote control and other factors). It's very unreliable, though, so we don't recommend this for most users. I installed Crunchyroll (before a Fire TV app was added to the store) without a problem, but when I launched the app it appeared as a portrait-format smartphone app and didn't display an onscreen cursor, making it unusable. It's also a clunky solution we wouldn't recommend for anyone who isn't confident in their technical abilities and knows their way around a command line, but it does offer some freedom not available with a Roku device or the Apple TV.

Alexa and Voice Search

Any shortcomings in the Fire TV app store are made up for by the powerful voice assistant and search functions. By holding the microphone button down on the remote, you can search for movies, shows, and apps simply by speaking into it. You can't use it hands-free by saying "Alexa," but you can optionally pair it with an Echo speaker (or any other Echo device) for hands-free voice control. Since the remote has to be pointed at the TV to work and has a very limited set of controls, that hands-free integration isn't close to what the Fire TV Cube offers; it can't switch inputs on your TV or control other home theater devices.

Alexa adds a lot of convenience that the voice search functionality on Roku devices doesn't offer. You can check the weather, find out sports scores, bring up Wikipedia information, and even add items to your shopping list. You can also add skills to Alexa for additional features, like ordering a pizza through Domino's. Third-party skills vary wildly in functionality and usefulness, but they really add to what you can do with the Fire TV Stick. See Amazon's highest-rated Alexa skills in every category for some ideas.

Alexa can search based on show and movie titles, actor and director names, and broad genres and themes (though the more vague your requests are, the less reliable the results will be). The voice search feature spans across many different apps and services including Netflix and Hulu, and the Fire TV Stick keeps track of any subscriptions you might have and front-loads search results to highlight content available on those services.

Because it's connected to your TV and isn't simply a speaker like the Amazon Echo, the Fire TV Stick can give you visual information in response to your Alexa requests, like the Echo Show and Echo Spot (but without the touch-screen controls).

Alexa also lets you control smart home devices with your voice. A wide variety of connected lights, locks, thermostats, and other home automation equipment are compatible. Holding a button down and speaking into a remote isn't quite as convenient as the hands-free voice activation of the Echo devices, but it's still a useful way to bring down the lights when watching a movie, or adjusting the temperature of the house without getting up. You can also bring up live feeds from any connected Alexa-compatible home security cameras, like the Amazon Cloud Cam, letting you check on your home (or anywhere else you've set up a camera) with your voice and see what it sees through your TV.

Voice and Playback Performance

Voice recognition is excellent. Even with my voice sounding hoarse from a cold, the Fire TV Stick understood all of my requests. It brought up search results forAgents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Gundam,andVoltron with no issue, gave me a weather forecast for the coming week, and answered various bits of trivia. It's impressively accurate and responsive for a $40 streaming device.

Performance is aided in part by a quad-core processor that significantly speeds things up over the previous model. Navigating menus isn't quite as fast as it is with the 4K-capable Fire TV Cube, and the stick can only output up to 1080p video, but it's still very responsive. I had no issue flipping between different apps and quickly loading movies and shows.

Like all media streamers, especially ones that only use Wi-Fi, video quality depends on the speed and signal strength of your network. If you want to use a wired connection, an optional Ethernet adapter for Fire TV devices is available for $15.

The Second Best Streamer Under $50

In the $50 range, the Fire TV Stick 4K stands out as our Editors' Choice for budget media streamers. If you haven't upgraded to 4K, though, the standard Fire TV Stick is an easy way to save $10, and equally worthy of award. The Google Chromecast and Roku Premiere both present very compelling alternatives to Amazon's Sticks, with the ability to access the Google Play on-demand libraries Fire TV can't. They make their own compromises, though; the Chromecast has no remote and requires you to use your smartphone, tablet, or computer to control it, and while the Roku Premiere has a much less feature-rich voice experience.

Amazon Fire TV Stick With Alexa Voice Remote

Cons

The Bottom Line

Amazon's Fire TV Stick is faster and less expensive than ever, and comes with an Alexa-enabled voice remote out of the box, making it the best budget-friendly media streamer you can buy.

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