The Fire TV’s “Live Experience,” as Amazon calls it, consists of a built-in channel guide that displays each channel in a traditional scrollable grid layout and the ‘Live’ tab, where content that is airing now is grouped together by various genres (e.g., News, Sports, etc..) and service. Even though more and more apps have added support for this interface over the years, I suspect that most Fire TV owners ignore it entirely. When you don’t know what to watch and/or are sick of endlessly scrolling through the same old apps, it’s sometimes nice to just channel surf through live content or just put a never-ending channel on in the background, like the good old days. Here are instructions for how to quickly add over 100 live channels, completely for free, to the Fire TV’s channel guide and live experience.
The number and selection of free channels changes over time. At the time that I am writing this, there are a total of 133 free live channels available across various apps. You’ll be able to customize the channel list to the ones you care about by deleting individual channels and favoriting others.
- Install the following Free apps on your Fire TV. Each app adds a certain number of free channels.
Pluto TV: Currently offers 49 Channels for Free
Sling TV Currently offers 36 Channels for Free
Red Bull TV: Currently offers 10 Channels for Free
Tubi: Currently offers 8 Channels for Free
IMDb TV (already pre-installed):Currently offers 30 Channels for Free
- Sling TV is the only app that currently requires logging in to access the free channels, so you’ll need to create an account. Either within the Sling TV app or on Sling.com, you can start signing up for a free trial but then stop when it asks for payment information. When you get to the payment information part, your acocunt will have already been created, so you can log in with it in the Sling app.
- On the Fire TV, go to Settings > Live TV > Manage Channels. You should see all of the above apps listed. If any of them are missing, go to Settings > Live TV > Sync Sources and select the app that is missing. Sometimes it helps to restart the Fire TV for all channels to be added.
- If you’d like, from the Manage Channels screen, you can go into each service and see the list of channels. From there you can press PLAY to hide a channel or press SELECT to favorite a channel. When a channel is favoirited, it will appear at the top of the channel guide and at the front of the Live tab’s row for that service.
- Now you can browse all the free channels in the channel guide and the Live tab. You can open the channel guide by either saying “open guide” into the voice remote or by selecting the “Channel Guide” button in the Live tab. If your Fire TV remote has a button with a TV icon (currently only on Fire TV Stick Lite and Fire TV Edition remotes), that button will also open the channel guide.
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I must admit that when I first heard about this, I thought cool but I can already watch this stuff as is.
But then I started to realize that this is actually a very good way to watch various free content in one place.
I just wish that you didn’t have to install each app as it’s always a fun chore with the 8GB of space on the Fire TV Stick, at least the 2nd Gen & Lite for me.
I know there are some ways around the 8GG limit but it’s not always practical.
Can you do this instillation for the Amazon fire stick
Yes it works the same
How can you get around it?
Very nice. Can’t believe I get 1st for once.
Ops. Never mind.
Lol, you almost did make it, my browser kept acting up at first and I had to star over. Lol
Yeah almost.
How can I download theses apps and have these free channels on the Fire TV if I’ll keep getting a pop up message on the screen saying the tv has low storage and I need to DELETE some apps?
All in all, I would switch to a Fire Cube or a Fire TV (which are pretty cheap) and can be gotten with more storage.
On one TV I have a Roku an the other one is a Smart TV and I have hundreds you hundreds of TV channels completely FREE without paying nothing to scammer.
Get one of the inline OTG cords and add a flash drive,
https://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-add-external-usb-otg-storage-and-move-apps-on-the-fire-tv-stick-lite-fire-tv-stick-3-and-fire-tv-cube/
When my Firestick says that , ( low storage) I have to go to settings , manage apps ( not sure if that is exactly how you get there , but bet you can find it —- then delete cache on your apps ( could be several) – hope that works for you
Thanks….. I have done that tens of times but it doesn’t seem to resolve the problem.
There are times when ‘low storage’ has been an issue on multiple FTV4K devices for me and just ‘clearing cache’ seems to have little or a very temporary affect. What I have found to help at times is to go to SETTINGS – MY ACCOUNT and select SYNC AMAZON CONTENT. Give it about a minute to refresh and I have found recently that if I go back into APPLICATIONS and check INTERNAL SPACE indicator that a considerable amount of memory appears to be freed up. I had one device that was always in the 400MB to 600MB free space range, based on usage. Now that I periodically run SYNC AMAZON CONTENT, it sits at around 1GB of free space. It can still bounce lower based on usage, but running SYNC AMAZON CONTENT seems to get it back to the 1GB range. It could be a ‘placebo effect’, but it can’t hurt to give it a try. It doesn’t always have a dramatic affect, but running it every few days on my four (4) devices seems to get me more free space and I have to do much less clearing of cache to avoid ‘low storage’ warnings.
Thanks for that tip. I tried it and when syncing Amazon content it said “Syncing Amazon Paid Content”. I do not purchase any content from Amazon so it probably does not help me in my case and I am not sure if it does any housekeeping on free apps residing on the stick.
From. Another perspective, could it be a message from your Smart TV?
I had my volume get stuck on my Samsung tv and the solution was to delete some apps.
You can buy a couple of extensions and more memory for the firestick, Just google how to add storage to your firestick. Or you can simply delete some apps.
Buy an OTG cable and a small Sandisk thumb drive. Search this site and You Tube (TDUK) for How To Add USB Storage To Fire Stick. Put all your sideloaded apps on the USB drive.
Stupidly they don’t have Locast in their list of Live TV apps
(A) Clear cashe (go to Settings > Applications > Manage Installed Applications > select each individual app and Clear cashe
(B) Add additional USB storage (see link)
https://www.groovypost.com/howto/add-usb-flash-storage-amazon-fire-tv/
Just buy a Nvidia shield. Much faster, less buffering. You can side load whatever you want.
Tubi isn’t appearing on live channels even after launching the app first, restarting the device and launching the app, going into manage channels and sync sources (it doesn’t appear as one of the sources). Tried it several times now.
It might be region specific. I say give it a day and then try syncing sources and restarting again. When it initially has issues, it seems to eventually just fix itself.
You might have a modded version of Tubi. Uninstall and install from Amazon app store.
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if you use a 3rd party launcher to replace the main FireTV UI, is there a way to access this guide?
Try saying “Open Guide” into the voice remote”
I’m in the UK and the region of my Amazon account is set as UK. Even with the VPN active and set to the US, Sling TV, Tubi and IMDb TV do not appear in the Fire TV appstore for me to download. I’d like to try sideloading the apps to see if they will allow access to their content under VPN but need some help with this. Can anyone who has the apps installed use an APK Extractor and upload them to a hosting site please? I’m hopeful that once installed, the appstore will automatically update them as new versions get released as it has done this before with other sideloaded apps!!
I’m really excited to see this add Because I Been trying to get that Tubi App I can get it on my phone But I can’t get it on my Television I didn’t know I will have to buy a Fire Tv To get the App that I really enjoy Thanks!
Can you get this on any smart tv or does it have to be a fire tv?
If it’s a Fire TV branded smart TV, then you can get the live channels.
I installed the recommended apps on my Fire TV second gen box and moved the apps to the SD Card to free up space. Then I synced all the apps with the live guide. The Live Guide is sluggish. I went through all the channels in the manage apps settings and hid the channels I do not care to watch.
On my Fire TV second gen box, for the live channels in the Sling app, when selecting a channel in the live guide, it just opens the sling app rather than starting a stream of the selected channel.
First make sure you’re logged into the Sling app. Then try restarting your Fire TV. If that still doesn’t fix it, there’s probably a bug in the app that will hopefully get fixed soon.
Elias great article. I noticed another platform also offers Pluto TV and incorporates it into a system grid guide but there you get 257 channels. I was just wondering why the fire tv platform only allows 49 channels in it’s grid guide when the pluto tv app has many more channels available. I’ve been using Pluto tv and the grid guide for live tv even before the recast was released so maybe it’s my problem but I can’t seem to access any more than the 49 channels you mention.
I wish I knew the answer. When Pluto TV first integrated into the Fire TV’s guide, they only made 12 channels available. The number of channels has been increasing over time, but I don’t know why all channels aren’t available. I assume it’s Pluto TV that is limiting the number of channels, not Amazon, so maybe it’s a content licensing issue.
Elias,
Was wondering if heard or learned of anything further as to why Pluto only shows a limited number of channels in the integrated live programming guide. It’s is the one aspect of the live guide that I find REALLY annoying, LOL. You suggested it might be a Pluto thing??
Hi Elias, I’m trying to get into the Live TV submenu, but after asking for the pin, nothing happens. Same after restarting
Hmm, maybe try disabling parental controls altogether and then reenable them after setting everything up.
I wish someone could get REAL live TV channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS) instead of the junk that’s currently on offer. I don’t want to watch 24/7 “news” channels or home shopping channels!
Would be nice if locast integrated. If you have / use locast request integration, I have.
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Finally got around to trying this; quite cool, especially w/Recast in the mix for OTA. This set-up now beats Live Channels on Android TV, which has become buggy as heck. Hope Amazon adds XUMO and that would make all the free channels I need complete :)!
Hello hdmkv, I saw that you mentioned Amazon Recast and OTA, so you have to get a antennae as well. Does this work well on the Fire Cube or the Firestick? Have you tried HDhomerun with the Firestick and the live tab?
How can I view Fire TV’s “Live Experience,” channel guide on computer? I want to be able to decide what to watch without interrupting what I’m watching at any time, or is there a way to view it in Picture in Picture?
Great write up, thanks!
How do you deal with channels that are duplicated among the installed apps? Don’t want same channel in the guide more than once.
Any idea which live TV apps have the least amount of annoying ads?
@Harry
my channel guide doesn’t mix apps, in other words it lists the OTA channels, then the IMDB (probably that one second because Amazon owns it) then lists the Pluto apps line up followed by Tube. In my opinion the IMDB app is seriously flawed and I don’t mess with it much since Amazon wrecked.. I mean, bought it. Pluto seems to randomly insert ads (with high repetition of particular ads) anywhere..mid sentence, mid paragraph, although they aren’t as horrible as they used to be. On my equipment, Pluto buffers for along time before starting and often in the middle of things. Tubi is my hands down star, they play a minimum of ads, doesn’t cut in except where an ad space is in the script… the way TV God designed it, and it doesn’t buffer at all, remembers were you were in a show if you have to leave in the middle of something. My only complaint is is that I’m running out of content a bit because for the last year I streamed full seasons of everything all day and night.
Settings-Live Channels-Manage Channels allows you to hidd channels from the guide.
there is no live tab on my 3rd gen firestick
how can i install it