Amazon Fire TV Stick in an “unsupported” market
Earlier this year Netflix expanded to a wide range of markets including my neck of the woods (Lithuania). I’ve signed up but watched it exclusively on a PC all this time. Recently we have started watching Designated Survivor as a “family time” with my daughter and I figured I need a proper consumer-friendly way of watching Netflix on my TV (it’s a perfectly adequate 2010ish Samsung but there’s no Netflix app for it).
So, I started looking for the cheapest but decent way to watch Netflix (and hopefully more) on a big screen. Two top choices came up — Amazon Fire TV Stick and Roku Streaming Stick. Neither is officially available here. However, a friend was going to UK and I asked him to bring me a Fire TV Stick.
As my luck goes, I bought just days before Amazon announced a new 2016 model, but it shouldn’t make much difference in the context of this post.
There’s no point in me reviewing the Stick overall. There are plenty of reviews on the web. What I wanted to show here is what you are getting if you don’t live in one of the supported markets, don’t have Amazon Prime and can’t be bothered to play with VPNs and other stuff to pay Amazon for still basically “illegal” content.
Netflix is fine
The most important news for me was that Netflix isn’t tied to any regional limitations of Amazon Fire TV and works perfectly fine with a local account. The app is beautiful, fluid and responsive. The video quality is great but, for some reason, not 100% smooth. Nothing major but it’s often a tiny bit choppy. I see similar things in other video apps, so I’m not sure. I’ll try to get to the bottom of it at some point.
The home screen is a non-customizable wasteland for “foreigners”
The home screen is aimed at pushing content and services from Amazon and its partners. The problem is that 90% of those are not available here. So most of it is there just to annoy you :) And you can’t do much about it.
TV to Watch While Abroad is a joke and still requires a Prime account anyway
While I expected that most of the content won’t be available to me, I was a little shocked with how little is available if you are an actual Prime member and just happen to be abroad at the moment. You get like 20 TV shows including cartoons and that’s it.
Going through “while abroad” section you can watch trailers and pilot episodes of the shows without a Prime account.
However once you get past that you have to have a Prime account (which you can’t get) to continue.
I’m not sure why they won’t make it available for purchase if it can theoretically be viewed from over here. I guess it’s just not a priority.
Apps and services are hit and miss
Most of the content advertised on the home screen and elsewhere is available via partner apps and majority of those are unavailable.
While I understand that you can’t access subscription services like HBO, Showtime, etc. Some apps that you wouldn’t expect to be blocked in fact are.
You can’t access apps for most major US and UK media companies like NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, etc. However you can get a Fox News app. Go figure :)
Despite quite a few apps being unavailable there’s quite a lot that you can get. Including TED, The Economist Films, Washington Post Video, Spotify, etc.
You can also buy paid apps (provided they are available). I’ve bought a couple of apps without problems through my Amazon account.
To summarize the apps situation — it’s not great, but it isn’t tragic either.
No native YouTube app
I was a little surprised that there’s no native YouTube app. The “app” is just a wrapper for YouTube’s Leanback web UI. Which is adequate, but missing one of my favorite features - play speed adjustments. On the other hand, the native Android app doesn't have it either (correct me if I'm wrong).
Amazon content
One of the things I hoped would work is buying Amazon Originals ala carte. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Even trailers and free first episodes are geo-restricted
Going beyond
Plex
If you happen to have a home server (or just another PC acting as one) you can install a Plex server on it and download a Plex app on your Fire TV (and basically any other device) to get a nicer experience for your local media consumption.
Side-loading
Since Fire OS is based on Android you can enable side-loading on it and download and install APKs from outside of the Amazon’s store. Obviously it’s not that difficult to take this over the line both in terms of legality and security. However, in our particular “unsupported” scenario this may help you overcome some moronic restrictions (like, why can’t we install a Twitter app??)
Aptoide
To make side-loading user-friendly you can download and install a 3rd party app store called Aptoide and install apps from there.
Kodi
Kodi (previously know as XBMC) is a very powerful and highly customizable media center software. Sky is the limit once you install and configure Kodi, but it feels a bit geeky to use and slightly unpredictable once you start looking into different addins, etc.
Other notes
Bluetooth headphones
I somehow missed that Fire TV Stick supports Bluetooth headphones directly, while I was evaluating it vs. Roku Stick. And this is a major advantage, in my opinion. While Roku can (supposedly) stream to your headphones via a mobile app, native Bluetooth support on the Fire TV just works without any intermediaries (provided you have BT headphones).
Miracast
I wasn’t able to make my Windows 10 Mobile phone and Fire TV Stick to play nicely over Miracast (screen mirroring). I was kinda hoping to get rid of another dedicated Miracast dongle I have, but looks like it’s not going to happen. I would expect that it works nicely with Android, but I haven’t tried.
Additionally there are 3rd party apps to enable AirPlay on the Fire TV. I tried one and it works perfectly (at least for photos) with an iPhone.
Conclusion and links
While in this post I focus on the negative aspects of using Fire TV outside of intended regions, I am definitely happy with the purchase. At this low price it transforms your dumb(-ish) TV into a smart one that is better than most newest Smart TVs.
However, if you own a reasonably new Smart TV and it has all the apps you need in decent shape, there’s probably no good reason to get a Fire TV, since you won’t be able to access most of it’s primary differentiators.
Buy Fire TV Stick (new 2016 version) (referral link).
