Amazon Fire TV Stick.

[Suff]

I bought this to facilitate a switch to Prime as a middle finger in the air to Netflix for being boneheads about VPN's.

So I set up my Prime free trial, added a few movies to the watch list and bought the TV stick and waited for it to arrive.

When it arrived I managed to get rid of the "we're so good, You'll love it so much, how about doing this with it" video's and got right to the menu's.

First point noted was that my watch list was blank. So I checked I was logged in with my normal Amazon account and then it demanded that I subscribe for a new 30 day Prime trial.

Which I did.

Then I found one of my Movies and tried to watch it. The Fire TV stick promptly insisted that it was not in my Prime list and that I should sign up for a 7 day free hulu account to watch it. Which I refused.

I then went to the PC and watched the movie in question, on my PC, in full, under my Prime subscription.

At this point I backed out of all prime stuff and started to look for what I could do with it. It turns out that it's a really excellent Netflix player.. Much better than my BluRay player...

As you can imagine I have cancelled my Prime subscription and gone to the Fire TV stick and put in a one star review. Total piece of junk. Extremely irked at idiots who want to treat their customers like idiots. I shall use it as a Netflix player until a better one comes along. Then I shall buy a second hand blender and see how well it blends..... Which is exactly what it deserves and the cost of the blender will be worth it.

[Workingman]

I have a Smart Box for my home TV with all those streaming sites I never use, but I also have a DVB-TS stick to get TV on the laptop/tablet.

If I tune it in using a hotel's aerial to get the local channels it works pretty well on its 6" whip aerial when away from the hotel, say at work - TV on-the-go.

[Suff]

Yeah, TV tuner I don't need, web streaming player I do. The tuners are very mature tech, the streamers are money grabbers. I can see the Amazon one being consigned to the blender yet....

[Diflower]

We have the fire tv box not stick and it's brilliant

[Suff]

Yep I've read that about the box too. The stick, on the other hand, seems to be expressly designed to suck you into spending huge sums of money.

I've put my review on Amazon with a 1 star and my issues. Notably nobody from Amazon has contacted me to fix my issues and correct my review and I know they police them as they are sensitive to their image.

[Suff]

So,

It appears that because I had a French delivery address on my UK Amazon account when my first Kindle was registered, they changed my content address to France.....

So the TV stick should work, but the service sucks greatly.

They sent me instructions for the UK site, which are not valid for the French site and it took me a while to realise that you can only change these settings in English on the US site....

It is done now and I'll check my stick tonight.

But they still get 1 star for being a useless bunch of wasters who are more concerned with screwing up my viewing because of the address I have on my account than with providing me with the tools I need to ensure I get the viewing I need.

It probably also explains the TV tools which are available..

As you can guess, they mailed me. They monitor 1 star reviews of their own products.

[Workingman]

I had never really got into looking at these things as my TalkTalk Smart Box sets itself up automatically once it is plugged in and enabled.

However, looking about it appears that Fire, Roku and Chromecast are app driven to get the most out of them, or at least it appears that way.

Never mind, I am happy with the TV stick and the laptop's DVD player - for now.

[Diflower]

Don't use much in the way of apps.
Menu lists movies available for free and on prime for free, separate list of those only free for limited time. Can list by genre etc.
I sometimes go online to amazon as it can be easier, flick through the new releases and you can add to your watch list.
Then when you turn the tv on with fire you have your watch list there too.

Also you can play any of your music through it, don't do that a lot but they also have a huge amount of free music and ready-made playlists. Quite like those if you want a quick choice to have on while eating

[Suff]

Yep the idea is brilliant, the execution is not always so good.

The reason I was willing to get the FireTV stick was that I need to see just how much there is with subtitles (Mrs S is 75% deaf these days) and how those movies display with the Amazon player.

So you can imagine when I see the app setup for France, no movies, no apps to download, that I was a tad irked...

We'll see what it's like tonight.

Netflix is an app but it's cost is £0...

[Diflower]

Yes I can imagine!
Hope you can get good value out if it x