Product Details
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Amazon Fire TV
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| List Price: | $99.99 |
| Price: | $84.99 & eligible for FREE Shipping on orders over $35. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
Average customer review:
(4828 customer reviews)
Product Description
Amazon Fire TV is a tiny box that connects your HDTV to a world of online entertainment. Amazon Fire TV now brings you 4K Ultra High Definition streaming capability, giving you a best-in-class television experience with true-to-life picture quality when used with compatible 4K Ultra HD TVs—something Apple TV, and Chromecast don’t support. Your 4K TV must support minimum HDCP requirements for protected content playback. Now with 75% more processing power than the previous generation Fire TV, a dedicated graphics engine, better Wi-Fi support, and 2 GB of memory. Your voice just got more powerful: not only can you search using your voice remote—now you can use Alexa, the brain behind Echo, on your Amazon Fire TV. Alexa answers questions, plays music, checks sports scores or the weather, and more—instantly.
Now you can use Alexa, the brain behind Echo, on your Amazon Fire TV. Alexa, a cloud-based voice service provides, information, answers questions, plays music, checks sports scores or the weather, and more—instantly. Just ask Alexa using your Fire TV Voice Remote.
With Amazon Fire TV, you can stream movies and TV shows in 4K Ultra HD, 1080p, or 720p. With Dolby Audio, enjoy rich cinematic surround sound via HDMI (up to 7.1) in supported apps including Amazon Video, HBO GO, and Starz, with Netflix, and Plex coming soon. From the responsive interface and instant search results, to smooth gaming and ultra-fast streaming, everything about Amazon Fire TV is fast and fluid. It's all thanks to a quad-core processor with 75% more processing power than the previous generation Amazon Fire TV, a dedicated graphics engine, and 2 GB of memory. Say goodbye to buffering: you shouldn't have to wait 10 seconds for a video to buffer every time you press "Play". ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction) learns what Amazon movies and shows you like and gets them ready for you to watch. The more you use Fire TV, the more accurate ASAP becomes, dynamically adapting to your viewing habits.
What's on Amazon Fire TV?
With over 3,000 channels, apps, and games, Amazon Fire TV offers all your favorite subscriptions and streaming services. Watch over 250,000 TV episodes, movies, including live TV. Kick back with sports, news, music, and games. With instant access to Netflix, Amazon Video, HBO NOW, Hulu, and more, you're sure to find something you love. Watch live TV with Sling TV, which includes ESPN, AMC, HGTV, TNT, Food Network, ABC Family, and more. Millions of songs are available to stream on Amazon Fire TV through Prime Music, Pandora, and Spotify. Amazon Fire TV is also the easiest way to game on your HDTV. Many games are free, and paid games start from just 99 cents.Meet Alexa
TV the way you want it
Use your cable subscription to stream what you love on-demand through apps like HBO GO, Showtime Anytime, A&E, Watch ESPN, and more. Get access to all your favorites with Fire TV - download the apps and enter your cable account information to start watching. Stream your favorite shows at the same time they're broadcast with NBA Gametime, CBS News, and more. Plus watch live TV with Sling TV—which includes ESPN, AMC, ABC Family, TNT, Food Network, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, CNN, HGTV, and A&E. Subscription fees may apply.Even better with Prime
With Prime Video, thousands of movies and TV shows including The Americans, Justified, and Downton Abbey, are available to stream instantly, at no additional cost. Access your favorite HBO shows like The Sopranos in the HBO Collection. As a Prime member, unlock hours of new shows created by Amazon Studios. From Bosch to the award-winning series Transparent, plus great shows for kids like Creative Galaxy, Amazon Originals showcase comedy, drama, and children's programming you can only see on Amazon. With Prime Music, you can listen ad-free to over a million songs. And there are more than one thousand Prime Music Playlists and hundreds of Prime Stations to choose from based on your mood, activity, artist or decade of choice.Tiny box. Huge specs.
Easy to set up and use
Amazon Fire TV arrives pre-registered to your Amazon account and sets up in minutes. A user-friendly interface makes it easy to browse popular movies, shows, and personalized recommendations straight from your home screen. Use your voice remote to find your favorite TV shows, movies, songs, albums, and more.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #4 in Amazon SMP
- Size: 8 GB
- Color: BLACK
- Brand: Amazon
- Model: DV83YW
- Released on: 2015-10-05
- Dimensions: .70" h x 4.53" w x 4.53" l, .59 pounds
Features
- All-new Amazon Fire TV now supports 4K Ultra HD for true-to-life picture quality. Watch high-definition 1080p streams on Amazon Video, Netflix, Hulu and more, even without a 4K TV.
- Now with Alexa, use your Fire TV Voice Remote to check sports scores or the weather, play music, and more - instantly
- Enjoy over 250,000 TV episodes and movies on Netflix, Amazon Video, HBO GO, and Showtime Anytime, plus games, music, and apps
- Cutting the cord? Watch the best of live TV on NBC News, NBA, and Sling TV, which includes ESPN, CNN, HGTV, AMC, A&E, Cartoon Network, and more.
- Say it. Watch it. Simply say the name of what you want to watch and start enjoying in seconds.
- Now with 75% more processing power, a dedicated graphics engine, better Wi-Fi support, 2 GB of memory, 8 GB of storage and expandable storage of up to 128 GB
- With over 800 games - the most games of any other streaming media player - there is something for the entire family, including Minecraft, Lego Star Wars, and Pac-Man 256
- Amazon Prime members get unlimited access to Prime Video, including original programming like Transparent, plus over 1 million songs with Prime Music
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews322 of 337 people found the following review helpful.
Better than I thought… From a techie guyBy Man Parrish
Better than I thought… From a techie guy...
I'm a big geek… I have tons of boxes and electronic toys… I even have several Google TVs which are now outdated. I'm pretty blown away by this box, and the amount of "content apps" available. For instance the unknown "Pluto TV" app has over 100 HD streaming stations. Some of them obviously aren't great, but it's definitely enough to keep you busy. For hours on end. Some of the channels have an hour or two of programming and just loop over and over again, but there's enough content on other channels to keep you busy for days.
If you're looking for the end all answer to cut your cable TV service, FireTv does not have things like live CNN, AMC and other cable stations (yet), but you could purchase a subscription for Sling TV (Google it) which has ala-carte live TV services. Something Apple is promising to deliver. If you have a current cable subscription, you can get things like HBO and Netflix streamed to your box if you are already paying for it in your home cable subscription. Your provider "passes through" the HBO, Netflix, etc programming through to this box. So for instants if you had an outdoor TV, TV in an attic or basement, you don't need to add another cable box to watch movies. .
It has all the standard bells and whistles like Netflix, Hulu, and those sort of services . The box is fast, does what it's advertised. I have a Ultra HDTV. Although ultra high definition content is scarce these days, this box probably has the most ultra high definition content of any other unit. Granted a lot of those ultra high definition videos are of "Flyovers of nature" type videos. if you have Amazon prime, then you can stream several of their in-house shows in ultra high definition. They do have a large range of very popular movie theater type movies in ultra high definition, but there is no rental availability. And I doubt I'm going to spend $35 to watch Spiderman and ultra high definition. Just not worth it.
If you're looking at this to be your end all box, it's pretty close. I'm curious to see what the AppleTV will have to offer, since I have multiple televisions in my household, I plan on having both systems right now . If your TV has a "smart hub feature" that contains all these built in apps, you may be doubling up on some of those popular ones like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.
I read the reviews on the Live Sling TV service, and they said they're still having a lot of problems with successful streaming, that it still there's quite a bit of buffering and videos just stopping for no reason. But sling TV does offer many stations live like cable for about $25 a month. If this is to be used with a second TV, like bedroom or living room, it's a nice supplement to have for your cable TV box, which you could probably drop down to basic service.
Remember… This is all in its infancy. And it will take several years to shake out who the leader is. This is definitely "THE" top-of-the-line box right now. The price is cheap, and you will definitely spend hours, and hours sifting through many obscure and fun channels.
UHD TV Note: If you have an ultra high definition television set and want to see content in 4K video, make sure that you check your TV manual or google your sets model number for info online. I have two Samsung 8500 TVs. It drove me crazy during set up, because I did not realize that only one of the four poorly marked inputs on my Samsungs could handle ultra high definition, 4K content thru HDMI. It's quite possible that your set will not handle any 4K content through HDMI, and that your tv only plays 4K content through its internal hub system or a special breakout box. Make sure you check that out first, if 4K is a critical feature for you !
You will also need a high-speed HDMI cable, that can carry the band width of 4K content. Your TV set will search for that band with to know that it's there. If you use a standard HDMI cable, even though you're running 4K content, your TV will not switch that feature on.
One last critical thing… It would be best to run an ethernet cable from the back of that box, to your router. And then an HDMI 4K cable to the back of your television. If you're streaming bandwidth is not fast enough, or has lots of interference, your set or the box will downshift to standard high definition to deliver you smooth video. This box DOES deliver 4K video. It's up to you to make sure you have the bandwith, the inputs, and a television set that can handle this type of stream of data. The high definition picture on this is quite crisp and clear. And quite honestly, a lot of the 4K video, you probably won't notice much of a difference, and less you're a super geek LOL.
Great box, definitely gworth the money. I forgot to mention, it has Amazon's "Alexa" built in… That is Amazon's version of Apple's Siri. Pick up the remote, ask it a question, the weather, pretty much anything, and chances are it will find it for you. I did ask it to find certain kinds of things and it had difficulty. It's a very simple system, pick up the remote, ask it a question, the weather, sports, news, pretty much anything, and chances are it will find it for you. I did ask it to find certain kinds of movies and it had difficult with it, but it did respond that it "wasn't available at this time" which seems to me that they are working to make it an even deeper search engine.
This box is tiny… Enjoy!
1522 of 1617 people found the following review helpful.
Nice device, but the increasingly aggressive ads and underhanded tricks to auto enroll you in services has become too sleazyBy Brian
Started off loving this thing, but little by little the forced ads are getting sleazier and sleazier. First it started with slipping ads into the Amazon Prime content which I was paying for so I could watch it ad free. Then ads even started showing up in TV Shows and movies I purchased out right. If I have to watch ads no reason to pay for it.
The final straw is that the episode lists for some TV shows now have fake episodes listed that are actually tricks to auto enroll you in other services. ( See the picture. Note that episode 13 is listed twice.) If you click on that you will be auto enrolled in Hulu, and auto billed. It will then be on you to go to Hulu your self and manually cancel the subscription you never wanted. This is just sleazy. This is a show that I already had access to on Amazon Prime. It is ridiculous for me to be dragged to Hulu where I have to pay for it a second time, AND where I would have to watch it with even MORE ads. The only one benefiting here is Amazon who must be getting paid under the table to trick and screw over it's customers.
I have thrown in the towel and gone back to AppleTV.
RE-UPDATE: There no longer seem to be ads at the start of Amazon Prime content, so that has at least improved.
RE-RE-UPDATE: They are no longer auto enrolling you in Hulu if you click on the fake episode listings. Now it just takes you to the Hulu app, but they are still injecting fake episode listings into content you have already paid to watch, and if you click on them you will be taken to third party services that will charge you again to watch the same content you already paid Amazon to watch.
1980 of 2121 people found the following review helpful.
Geared towards Prime contentBy Natalya the Spy
Hey Alexa, Hey Alexa - Night and day it's Hey Alexa. Make the fire, fix the breakfast, Wash the dishes, do the mopping!
Ok, so I haven't figured out how to make Alexa clean my house like Cinderella...yet. But I'm working on it. In the meantime, I have figured out that she is much more than a glorified alarm clock or DJ. Although, you should know that alarms are "not currently supported on this device," like they are on the Echo. This is a more basic version of Alexa. It doesn't have her full functionality.
ABOUT ME
I'm not sure what the target demographic for this product is, but I am a professional female in my early thirties, who is in a committed relationship. That is a nice way of saying that my partying days are behind me and my boyfriend and I spend a lot of time binge watching stuff on the sofa. Yes. We are suburban couch potatoes. No shame here. Also, I am an Amazon Prime member, but do not have a 4k TV.
I used to have a Roku that I used for Netflix and Hulu. However, I was more interested in free shipping, so I moved to Prime and got a Fire TV Stick when it was offered for $19.99. For me the stick is a glorified HDMl cable. You could get the same benefits by connecting your laptop to your TV. It's less cumbersome, but that's about it. I wanted it because it said it could mirror your device's screen onto your TV. It didn't explain clearly enough that the only "device" it could do that with was a Kindle. That is why I didn't order the Echo when it came out. It sounded cool but I couldn't figure out what it actually did. Since then, my father got one for my mother, who had a stroke, and it is awesome. The Echo is very cool, but it is also an incredibly useful tool, particularly for those with a physical disability or technology aversion.
So now having experienced the fire stick and the program for the Echo (which is called Alexa), I was actually excited to see a device that combined the two.
DIMENSIONS AND PORTABILITY
As for the device itself, it is 10 oz, 4.5" wide, 4.5" long, and 5/8" thick. The remote is 6" long, 1.5" wide, 1/2" thick and weighs 2.5 oz. It connects via HDMI cable (not included) and plugs into a wall power outlet. It comes with its own special cord; it doesn't use a universal microUSB like the Fire Stick does. So, the Fire TV isn't big, but it isn't as portable as the stick, and you better not lose the cord. However, it beats out the stick in every other category, and it is plug and play, so you can take it anywhere you want.
CONNECTION AND SET UP
It connects quickly and easily to your Prime account because Amazon sends it to you already setup with the information. So, if you are buying it as a gift, you need to specify that while you are checking out. However, during the set up process it does give you the option to change the account associated with the device. The problem is that your account is preloaded (if you don't specify it is a gift) and it doesn't require a password during set up. You can set up Amazon FreeTime on it, though, so you don't have to worry about your kids making unauthorized purchases or overusing it.
AUDIO AND VIDEO
As for HD quality, it does provide a slightly better picture on my 5 year old Panasonic plasma than the stick does. I suspect it would improve more with newer TVs. Also, it does process tasks faster than my Fire Stick, both of which are connected to Verizon Fios via Wifi. The surround sound (Dolby) is great with anything Prime, but Netflix and other apps don't support surround sound.
VOICE CONTROL
However, the best part is definitely Alexa and the voice activated remote. You can say things like, "Alexa, show me comedic movies." It will take you to a list of comedies. You can access anything on the box, such as games and apps, but it is also a virtual search engine. You can ask, "What is the overnight weather forecast for San Diego, CA?" It will both tell you and show you on the screen. It hasn't figured out how to open my Watchlist yet. It processes the command properly, but takes me to the wrong place.
It is fast, it is responsive, and best of all it is accurate. Accuracy is an issue with most of these voice operated items. There is a learning curve, but Alexa rarely gets mixed up or confused once she figures you out. There is definitely a period of time when it's almost like talking to an elderly patient who didn't bring their hearing aid to the hospital with them (I'm a nurse). "You think I'm too hairy?!" "No. I said to play Katy Perry!" That kind of thing. But, Alexa is a quick learner.
Once the initial awkward dating period is over and you get to know each other better, Alexa is great with Prime Music. Say, "Alexa, play Walk like an Egyptian,'' and she will. Prime music has no commercials, and you can listen to specific songs or even entire albums with a quick verbal command. Sometimes, Alexa is smarter than you are. I said, "Alexa, play the pop radio station." She responded with, "Playing the Top Pop Prime Station," and put it on. And maybe she knows that secretly you really don't like Katy Perry that much. Prime music also scrolls the words on the screen as the song plays.
COOL FUNCTIONS
Another cool thing is that it can connect to bluetooth items. So, let's say that you like to have peace and quiet when you sleep, but your boyfriend likes to fall asleep with the TV on. He can put on a pair of bluetooth ear buds and let you sleep. You can also project sound to bluetooth speakers, if you wanted to.
Lastly, you can finally share items from devices other than a Kindle. By saving your media to your Amazon cloud account, you can easily transfer and view them on your TV. It can supposedly mirror other devices as well, like an LG phone. But I haven't gotten it to work with my Samsung Note Edge yet. Still working on it. And I doubt it will ever work with any Apple products, but you never know.
GAMING
At this time, the gaming remote is $49.99 and isn't being released until October 22. It can be used with the new Fire stick also and you can use more than one gaming remote with each Fire TV (so kids can play multi-player games). However, if you want to play games it is a better deal to buy the Fire TV gaming version, Which is $139.99 and includes the game controller. It is at this link. Amazon Fire TV Gaming Edition Also, if you want to game, you can put up to 128gb of expandable memory in it.
The only reason I didn't buy that version (which includes a couple of free games) is because it doesn't also come with a regular remote. I don't want to always have to use a giant game controller, even with Alexa doing most of the work. Although, you can use your mobile phone as a remote for the Fire TV, using the Alexa App that Amazon offers.
WHAT IS MISSING
Please note that while Alexa works for everything offered by Amazon, and the voice commands work to take you to certain apps such as Hulu, I couldn't get it to take me to Netflix and the apps do not yet offer voice commands once you open them.
Also please note, it does NOT come with its own HDMI cable. And although you can play games with the remote that is provided, there is an additional gaming remote that is more tailored to that purpose.
There is one thing I wish Alexa could do, but doesn't. I wish she had the ability to make VOIP emergency calls. There are all sorts of apps now that can make phone calls. I noticed that when the Echo came out, it was a huge hit with disabled people, like my mother who had a stroke and never learned how to use electronics. It would be really nice if you could say, "Alexa, call 911" or "Alexa, call my emergency contact." It would only have to store 911 and maybe 1-2 emergency numbers. And it could be a life saver, literally. Amazon already sends texts to your verified phone number regarding delivery. You could set the device to show your verified number as the caller ID number. You could prevent pranks or accidents by setting a code word. "Alexa, call 911, codeword: ambulance." I think that would be amazing, but that's just me.
SUMMARY
If you need this mostly for Prime content, you will be very happy. You will have to wait for the updates to see if Amazon fixes the issues with the other apps. It looks like they hope to fix the surround sound issue with Netflix no later than Oct 22.
Sorry my review is practically a novel. If you were able to get through it, I hope it was useful. Feel free to leave any questions or comments. I always do my best to answer/respond.
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