

Voice control on the Fire TV still has some limitations: Alexa’s genre-search capabilities are frustratingly basic (you can search for “comedies,” but not “80s comedies” or “comedy movies”), and you can only launch video directly if the app supports it. The TV can even display live video from supported home security cameras. You can use these commands to launch videos or music in supported apps, search for content, or control video playback, and you can use the remote like any other Alexa device for asking about the weather, looking up sports scores, or controlling smart home devices.

Like other Fire TV devices, the Fire TV Stick 4K can also be controlled by voice commands, either by pressing the remote’s microphone button or talking hands-free with an Alexa device, such as the Amazon Echo speaker. There’s support for Dolby Atmos soundtracks, too, if you have the home audio gear to take advantage of it. TVs that support these formats can then optimize colors on a scene-by-scene basis. But while the previous Fire TV pendant and Fire TV Cube supported only the basic HDR10 format, the Fire TV Stick 4K goes further to support both Dolby Vision and HDR10+.
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The Fire TV Stick 4K is Amazon’s third crack at 4K HDR, which allows for both a crisper picture and more vibrant colors on supported televisions.
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The Fire TV Stick 4K with HDHomeRun is now a cost-efficient way to get free broadcast channels at full quality throughout the home, even with just one well-placed antenna. That means you can plug an HDHomeRun Connect TV tuner into your Wi-Fi router and watch over-the-air channels from an antenna at full broadcast quality from any television around the house.Īmazon’s Fire TV pendant and Fire TV Cube technically support this as well, but Roku doesn’t support MPEG-2 playback at all.

The Fire TV Stick 4K, despite its smaller size, gets a boost to 1.7GHz, and that goes a long way toward addressing previous models’ performance issues.Īmazon even threw a bone to nerdier antenna users by including hardware-accelerated MPEG-2 video support in the Fire TV Stick 4K. Last year’s Fire TV pendant included a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, as did the Fire TV Cube from earlier this year. But if those issues aren’t dealbreakers, you’ll find a surprising number of things to love about this budget streamer. It’s also a non-starter for YouTube TV subscribers-currently our favorite live TV streaming service-as Amazon and Google avoid supporting one another’s TV platforms. It remains, as always, optimized for Amazon Prime subscribers, and its interface, while interesting, remains bloated with promotional material and redundancies. The Fire TV Stick 4K won’t be for everyone. Factor in powerful Alexa voice commands and you have a compelling 4K HDR streamer at any price, let alone the lowest price on the market. It also corrects the stupidest mistake of previous Fire TV models by including TV volume and power controls on its remote control. The Fire TV Stick 4K is the media streamer that Amazon should have released years ago.Ĭooler than a Roku and much cheaper than an Apple TV, the new $50 streaming dongle offers 4K HDR video in every conceivable format while outperforming Amazon’s more expensive Fire TV Cube ($120) and third-generation Fire TV ($70, now discontinued).
