Amazon Fire TV

The Amazon Fire TV used to be available in a traditional slim box, but is now available in a even smaller dongle, which you can connect directly to your TV's HDMI port. The Fire TV runs Amazon Fire OS and it's the Fire TV Stick's bigger brother.

Amazon Fire TV

Pros

  • Very affordable for its performance level.
  • Relatively small and therefore easy to mount behind any screen.
  • You can install the Compete Narrowcasting playback app on it, making it run fully automatically.
  • Fully controllable it with the included remote control, so you don't need a separate keyboard and/or mouse.

Cons

  • Only available in countries that have their own Amazon store.
  • Playback is unfortunately unreliable. Especially when your channel includes video.
  • Won't play all animations fully smoothly.
  • The installation of the playback app is a bit cumbersome. Updating the app in the future is also a manual process.

Conclusion

Unfortunately we can only recommend this player for static content. It's too unreliable for playing video. It crashed several times during our tests.