Amazon - Fire TV (2015 Model) - Black

Before buying the FireTV, I had the FireTV Sticks. In an effort to cancel my cable, I signed up for Playstation Vue. Vue worked on the FireTV Stick and got the job done but when a sale came for the FireTV, I thought why not. Boy, night and day difference in speed of menu transitions and buffering of shows. Everything is just snappier and faster. Going back to a FireTV Stick was so painful because of the lag in menu transitions. If you could afford it, go for the FireTV over the Stick. Also I own a Roku 2 and the FireTV is MUCH more useful because of the ability to sideload apps.

Setup for the Amazon Fire TV box was very easy. I was surprised at how little the box actually was, and just how powerful some of the apps and downloadable games were that you can use on the Amazon Fire TV. I ended up ordering the Amazon Fire TV game controller online at Amazon. I am currently not an Amazon Prime member, but may re-consider that decision in time to get even more functionality out of the box. For anyone looking to buy a relatively cheap device to maximize their TV watching and even Console game playing, look no further than the Amazon Fire TV. Although it does not compare to a Playstation IV or X-Box it does have decent graphics on some of the available games. I had also purchased a class 10 64 GB micro SD card for the Amazon Fire TV Box as well and had no trouble formatting it and getting it setup.

It's somewhat of a step up from the Roku 3 I was previously using, but not as much as I was expecting. I think it's a couple firmware updates away from being better than it is now. Spent the good part of the day trying to figure out why I could only connect to my dual-band router at 2.4GHz and not 5GHz. 1.5 hours on the phone with Verizon FiOS tech support was unsuccessful as other devices connected at 5GHz without issue. Was about to pack it up and return it until I called Amazon tech support. Turns out it's a known-issue that the FireTV has difficulty with 5GHz networks that are set to auto channel selection and are utilizing channel numbers above 100. The tech support person said I should change the channel to 36, 44, or 48 instead of automatic, and, it worked. Bluetooth audio and video are out of sync with Showtime, Netflix, Sling, Plex and Hulu. It's fine through speakers, but video lags slightly behind the audio using Bluetooth. Audio and video are in perfect sync with Bluetooth and Amazon Prime Video which makes me think it'll be fixed at some point, as Amazon provided video demonstrates it can work well in that regard. Gotta say I prefer the platform agnostic UI of Roku, with Amazon-world tucked away in an app. The FireTV navigation pane represents mostly Amazon products with no option to modify it. Roku's UI is more about the media, less about the provider. Voice search works well if you want only to be presented with Amazon's viewing options, for some reason I thought search was universal, but only movies and TV shows available through Amazon show up. Bummer :-( The FireTV-2 is OK, less than I was expecting and with other good options around the corner, I'm beginning to doubt my choice...

I bought this for one reason, and thats Kodi, its an awesome device for that, and with the sd card reader its easy to install and get up and running, highly recommended

We got the FireTV because a friend recommended it to us. We were stick of our cable bill constantly going up and this was the best optio! It's a onetime purchase fee and you can download an App called Kodi and you can watch live Tv, previously played shows, and movie you can think of and even sports. Granted sometimes the quality isn't the best, it's free!! We were paying almost $200 for cable and Internet and now I pay $60 for internet and nothing to stay up with my shows and sports!! Best purchase I have made in a long time!!

I did some research on different streaming devices before I bought the FireTV. I would highly recommend it. I actually just cancelled my cable subscription because it works that well. I'm now saving over $100/month, you can't beat that. There are tons of apps and everyone can watch what they want.

I bought the Fire TV because, as much as I liked my Fire Stick, I found it was not great at buffering and I found that often the image on the screen would freeze. The Fire TV doesn't have that issue, and the controls and action and responsiveness to the remote are very smooth. Also the voice control works wonderfully.

Pros: - Amazon Prime works on it. - You can still sideload apps, like Kodi. Cons: - Not a good upgrade over the original Fire TV, is worse in some aspects. - Remote buttons are hard to press (compared to original Fire TV) - Remote loses connection frequently and takes several button presses or removing of the remote batteries to fix - Interface isn't as snappy as the original Fire TV - Same interface as the original Fire TV: There's still no good way to sort your apps or locate the Prime content that you want. - Voice search seems about the same as the original Fire TV. Alexa adds nothing significant. You still can't use it to search in 3rd party apps, like Youtube. - As for video decoding in Kodi, performance isn't much better than the original Fire TV. You will be able to play HEVC content at 1080p with no problem, but 1080p .264 hi10p (software-decoded) does not play well. There's simply not enough power. 4k decoding is hit-and miss. It needs to be specifically coded for this Fire TV (low bitrate, low fps) to work properly. - Overall system performance is bad. When sitting idle, the CPUs spike up to 60% usage and memory is at 60% usage. The OS is not well-optimized. I'm not confident that Amazon can fix these issues in a timely manner and their competitors are releasing their media players soon, so I'll likely return this while I still can.