The Fire TV Stick 4K is currently out of stock in the US because earlier this morning anybody could purchase it from Amazon for free. Around 6 A.M. PT, if you put the Fire TV Stick 4K in your Amazon cart, you would have found that your total at checkout was $0.00 without needing to enter a promo code or doing anything special. A discount, labeled as “Lumen/Century Link” for the entire cost of the device was automatically being applied to everyone’s purchase. Read more ›

Amazon has added a new shortcut to the Appstore on Fire TV devices that can be accessed from the main navigation menu. Previously, when you highlighted the Apps icon in the navigation menu, the peak area below simply instructed you to select the icon to view your apps. The peak area now has two buttons, one for “My Apps” to view all of your apps, and one for the “Appstore.” The new Appstore button takes you to the same screen as the actual Appstore app on the device, but now you don’t have to load your list of apps just to open the Appstore. The “My Apps” button is pointlessly redundant, in my opinion, since it just loads your list of apps, which you’ve always been able to access by selecting the Apps icon in the navigation menu. There’s no reason to highlight the Apps icon and then take the extra step to go down to the “My Apps” button when you can just select the Apps icon that you already have highlighted. The “My Apps” button should really be a shortcut to the “App Library” section of the Appstore, where all of your apps (installed or not) can be viewed.

Amazon, with the help of NBCUniversal, has added a new hub on Fire TVs to serve as a one-stop place for all 2022 Winter Olympic coverage. The new hub can be found in your list of apps and will be available between now and February 20th. In it, you’ll find shortcuts that take you directly into Olympic sections and content within NBCUniversal’s various apps, like Peacock and NBC Sports. In addition to the new hub, there is also now a row on the home screen that lists Olympic content that is currently live. If you’re not interested in the new hub, you can always highlight it, press the menu button on your remote, and select to hide it.

Over the weekend, especially yesterday, I saw a significant uptick in messages from people with Fire TV issues. The problems varied from network connection issues, to Alexa commands not working, to not being able to get past the initial setup process on a new Fire TV. While these all seem like unique issues, they were all related to issues with Amazon’s servers throughout the weekend. Fire TVs are constantly pinging Amazon’s servers to verify that they are connected to the internet. When those servers can’t be reached, or worse, can’t be reached intermittently, it tends to cause various Fire TV features to behave strangely. The issues with Amazon’s servers seem to have mostly been fixed now, but I figured I’d mention it in case people ran into issues over the weekend that they couldn’t explain. Whenever you run into issues with any Amazon devices, it’s always a good idea to check to see if there are active AWS issues or if others have reported AWS outages, before you start diagnosing things on your end.

Amazon has revealed that it has now sold more than 150 million Fire TV devices worldwide in total. This is the first time that Amazon, which normally does not reveal any kind of concrete sales figures, has indicated how many Fire TVs it sold. Amazon does occasionally reveal how many active Fire TV users there are, with the most recent figuring being 50 million active users as of about 1 year ago. Comparatively, Roku announced it reached 56.4 million active accounts in November 2021 and Google announced it reached 80 million active Android TV devices in May 2021. Total devices sold (Amazon’s latest figure), active users (Roku’s latest figure), and active devices (Google’s latest figure) are three very different metrics, so there’s no telling which streaming platform is in the lead at this point.