I'm trying an Amazon Fire TV stick, to see if I like it better than my Roku. I have loved the Roku but my wife is telling me that the Fire Stick doesn't buffer as often as the Roku does, so I'm trying one. It's too early to tell. I am nearly through watching my first streaming movie on the Fire Stick. So far, there hasn't been any buffering at all but, of course, the Roku would do that once in a while too, so I don't know yet whether it is better. If I decide that I like it, I'll have to buy another television, one that has dual HDMI ports, so that I don't have to keep plugging and unplugging between my Roku and the Fire Stick, because the Roku offers channels that I want to watch sometimes that aren't available through the Fire Stick.
I enter to win items on a few different sites/apps, and one I saw offered earlier was an Amazon Fire Stick. I recall doing some research way back when I was trying to decide which to buy, and I ended up going with the Roku. Does the Fire Stick offer almost as much as the Roku? I don't have Prime, which is one reason I knocked the Fire Stick off my list in the past, but I can't remember which other channels the Roku has that the Fire Stick doesn't cover.
Yeah, it offers some of the big ones that are on Roku, such as Neflix, Hulu, Sling, etc. What it doesn't have are the dozens of small ones that I sometimes like to watch, particularly the free ones that play 50's, 60's and 70's movies and television series. I already had Prime before they started offering streaming movies and such. When they started that, I used it a lot, but they are very slow about adding new stuff to Prime so I have rarely watched anything on Amazon Prime in the past couple of years. Netflix adds new stuff all the time. Hulu adds a lot of new stuff but I have never gotten good at finding my way around Hulu so I have a hard time finding anything there, and consequently don't use it often.
I tend to only watch the major ones anyway, so it probably wouldn't make much of a difference to me. Right now, unless I carry the Roku around with me (which can be a pain, because I always seem to forget the remote), I can only watch the few local channels in the bedroom, or Netflix.Since I don't tend to watch TV in there except late night, the local channels don't offer much. Ultimately, I want another of some sort of streaming device for that room, or to replace (preferably by winning one) the old smart TV with a newer one that will enable me to access those other sites/apps.
We have also talked about getting an Amazon Fire Stick. We have an older Apple TV , I think it is Generation 2, and a year or so ago, when it updated, it no longer worked with Youtube, which is one of the main things we watched on the Apple TV. Since ALL of the shows from iTunes cost money to either rent or buy, we seldom use their movie service at all. We do have Amazon Prime, so the fire stick would be an excllent choice for us, rather than getting a newer model of the Apple TV box. At least with Amazon, they have some free movies that a person can watch, as well as the ones you have to rent or purchase. The main reason that we haven't tried it is just because we hardly ever have the television turned on. Bobby likes to watch a few programs, and he has it on at that time each day; but otherwise, he watches whatever movies and programs he wants to watch on his iPad. Even if we got the Fire Stick, we would likely not watch the television any more than we do right now, and what Bobby watches is on Fox , anyway.
After about a week of using the Fire Stick, here's my report. I have it on pretty much all the time when I am home and awake and, so far, the only time that it has buffered is when I first click into a movie or when I pause it. I've never had any interruption in any movies that I have watched, which is a huge improvement over the Roku. On the negative side, as I've mentioned already, there isn't as much available through the Fire Stick, as compared to the Roku, and I can't get some of the stuff that I'm making monthly payments on, but that's because I can't remember what passwords I used, so that's not really a ding against the Fire Stick. It is easier for me to find my way around on a Roku, but that could simply be because I've been using the Roku for years and have only been using the Fire Stick for a couple of weeks. I am going to shop around for a television that has dual HDMI ports because I'm too lazy to keep unhooking one and hooking up the other. That might be a problem because, so far, the only ones that I have seen with dual HDMI ports have larger screens than I want. I don't have much available space for a television so I need a small one, like 17" or smaller.
I do have one more negative point about the Amazon TV Fire Stick. The remote sucks. It is very small and not so easy to use. This is a particular problem when I am trying to back a movie up, as it either backs up so slowly that I am reversing it in the same amount of time that I watched it in or it moves so fast that it goes all the back to the beginning, when that's not what I wanted to do. I also find myself hitting other buttons that I didn't want to hit.
WTH are you folks talking about? Maybe I don't really want to know. Is it PC to remain in the lower echelon of computer literacy, or must we, all, EVERYONE, become encompassed in the new existence? Mama don't take, my Kodachrome away!..........................