Back when the Amazon Fire TV Stick first showed up, the whole pitch was basically, “Hey, plug this in and boom—your old TV is suddenly smart.” Fast-forward to now, and most TVs fresh off the shelf already have some kind of smart interface built in. The thing is, a lot of those built-in interfaces… kind of suck. Some companies still haven’t cracked the code on making a simple, smooth UI. (Looking at you, LG, with your strange Wiimote-wannabe remotes). So at this point, the real draw of the Fire TV Stick isn’t that it makes your TV “smart”—it’s that it gives you a better smart experience. And right now, the newest Fire TV Stick HD is down to just $18. Normally it runs $35, but this deal chops nearly half off the price, which is pretty hard to complain about.
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Once you plug it in, you can basically stream anything you’d expect: Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max (or whatever they’re deciding to call it this month), Disney+, Prime Video—the usual cast.. As long as you’ve got the subscriptions, the content is there. But even if you don’t want to spend any more on streaming subs, the Fire TV Stick actually has quite a bit of free stuff built in. Apps like Freevee, Tubi, Pluto TV, and a ton of Fire TV’s own free channels give you a surprising amount of movies and TV show episodes to just kick back and watch. Sure, they’re ad-supported, but free is free.
One of the nicest quality-of-life things is the Alexa remote. No one enjoys hunting and pecking their way through an on-screen keyboard with a clunky d-pad. With the Alexa button, you literally just say what you want—“play Dune” or “find The Mandalorian”—and it pulls it up for you. It even scans across multiple apps to tell you which service actually has the thing you’re searching for, which saves you from the endless “which app did I watch that on?” guessing game.
Cloud-based Gaming
Another neat perk that’s becoming more and more practical: you can actually play cloud-streamed Xbox games through it. If you’ve got Game Pass Ultimate, you don’t need an Xbox console at all—the cloud streaming service lets you play straight on your Fire Stick as long as your internet isn’t terrible. It’s kind of wild being able to fire up games like Animal Well or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on something only marginally larger than pack of gum. As long as your Wi-Fi is steady, the whole experience is way smoother than you’d expect. And now with Red Dead Redemption 2 coming to a number of services including Netflix, now’s a great time to experiment with cloud gaming.
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