Amazon has announced the dates of its 2nd Prime Day of the year. The “Prime Big Deal Days” sales event, as it’s being called, will occur from October 10th through the 11th, but you can probably expect some items, like Amazon devices, to go on sale earlier than that. As for Fire TV deals, specifically, it seems like the discounts will be pretty mediocre. Read more ›
Plex is celebrating its third-annual “Pro Week,” which helps to educate Plex users on getting the most out of the app. As part of the event, Plex has put its Lifetime Plex Pass on sale for $95.99 when you enter promo code ITSPROTIME. That’s 20% off the regular price of $119.99. Having a Plex Pass unlocks additional features like hardware transcoding, file downloads, intro & credit skipping, and DVR features. This deal will end on September 22nd.
If you’ve ever felt like there was a bit of a divide between Amazon’s Echo and Alexa products and other Amazon devices, like Fire TVs and Fire Tablets, that’s because they have always been headed by different executives within Amazon. The two groups of Amazon devices have always been more like cousins with related parents than siblings of the same parent. That has now changed, I believe for the first time, because Daniel Rausch, who is Amazon’s head of entertainment devices which includes Fire TV, Fire Tablets, Kindles, and more, has recently been put in charge of Alexa as well. Read more ›
While the Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the second newest model in Amazon’s current Fire TV lineup, there have been a few signs that the device will be replaced with a new model this year. Most notably, a recent FCC filing for a pair of devices that appear to be Fire TV Sticks carry strong signs that they are a new Fire TV Stick 4K and 4K Max. Now, what is, in my opinion, the most telling sign that a new Fire TV Stick 4K Max is on the horizon has just occurred. Read more ›
A Redbox streaming app will arrive in the Amazon Appstore for Fire TV devices “later this year” as spotted by Cord Cutters News. Redbox’s parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (CSSE), which acquired the DVD/Blu-ray rental company turned streaming service last year, has announced the new app’s release as part of a larger deal with Amazon that will bring Amazon Interactive Video Ads to Crackle, also owned by CSSE, making it one of the first third-party services to support the advanced ad format which allows customers to add a product to their Amazon shopping cart directly from the ad break screen. The ads will also make their way into the Chicken Soup for the Soul app and the upcoming Redbox app. Redbox’s streaming apps, already available on Android/Google TV, Roku, and Apple TV devices, provide on-demand TV shows and movies for free with ads or to rent and own. It also offers several free ad-supported live streaming channels.
If you’re a fan of watching live channels, one of the best features of Fire TVs is the built-in program guide that combines channels from many apps and services into a single list. With a button that takes you directly to the guide on all modern Fire TV remotes, it’s handy to flip back and forth between channels no matter what service they’re from. While you can easily remove channels and services you don’t want to be included, the program guide can still easily become unwieldy with the number of channels it contains. Amazon has recently made changes to help filter through the channel guide that is already available on select devices and will, hopefully, be coming to more in the near future. Read more ›
Amazon has been periodically tweaking the navigation menu of the current Fire TV home screen interface ever since it debuted three years ago. First, it reordered the menu, then increased app icon sizes, and then added an input switching icon for Fire TV Smart TVs before finally dropping all text and switching to an icon-only navigation menu. Earlier this year, Amazon added a new “Free” tab to the navigation menu before ultimately removing it. Amazon is now trying out another new tab for the Fire TV home screen with the addition of a “Games” tab that takes the place of the profile switcher icon in the navigation menu. Read more ›
A common issue many Fire TV users run into is running out of internal storage space for their apps and games. Even though it has been nine years since the first Fire TV debuted with 8GB of internal storage, nearly all Fire TV models, including all Fire TV Sticks, still only come with that same 8GB of storage. Worse yet, as Fire OS has increased in size over the years and the number of pre-installed system apps have ballooned in both size and quantity as well, there is now less than 4GB of free space on most Fire TV models out of the box. One solution to the problem that Amazon is working on is simply automatically removing apps you don’t use much, but, thankfully, it seems like it won’t be as ridiculous of a solution as it may initially sound. Read more ›
What appears to be a pair of new Fire TV devices have just received FCC approval, as first spotted by Janko Roettgers. Both of the two new models were submitted to the FCC by Amazon as a “Digital Media Receiver” and, while there is no explicit mention of either one being a Fire TV device, the fillings have familiar characteristics that allude to these being Fire TV Sticks. Furthermore, the two devices are variants of each other, which likely means these are either a standard model and a “Lite” model, or a standard model and a “Max” model. Read more ›
Tablo just announced the next generation of its networked over-the-air (OTA) tuner and DVR earlier this week. One thing that immediately appeared in comments was concern over the device’s picture quality, since previous Tablo models were often criticized for downgrading the incoming broadcast before streaming it to devices. Jared Newman from TechHive recently interviewed Nuvyyo CEO Grant Hall and learned a lot more about the Tablo 4th Gen, including details about how and when it does and doesn’t transcode video which suggests video quality complaints may be a thing of the past when it comes to the new generation of Tablo DVRs if the device is used a certain way. Read more ›
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