Amazon Fire TV with 4K Ultra HD Review

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Alexa is the star of the show.

By Matt Elliott

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In a bid for your 4K streaming dollars, Amazon’s Fire TV with 4K Ultra HD (See it on Amazon) makes a compelling case by packing a ton of features into a tiny package for a low price. It costs less than half of the Apple TV 4K with a similarly powerful voice-enabled remote. At $69.99, it’s priced the same as the Roku Streaming Stick+ or the Google Chromecast Ultra, but the Roku’s voice-search capabilities can’t compete with the Fire TV’s Alexa-powered remote, and the Chromecast Ultra lacks a remote altogether, to say nothing about a slick on-screen menu.

Design and Features

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The Amazon Fire TV with 4K Ultra HD closely resembles the Chromecast. It’s a small dongle that is meant to hang off the back of your TV instead of a small box like the Apple TV or the previous Fire TV that is meant to sit alongside your TV. The Fire TV isn’t round like the Chromecast but a slightly larger square -- or diamond, depending on your perspective. It’s 2.6-inches across, and 0.6 inches thick. In one corner is the short HDMI cable that you plug into your TV, and in the opposite corner is a micro-USB port for plugging in the power cable.

Inside the square is a 1.5GHz Amlogic quad-core processor, 2GB of memory, 8GB of storage, and an 802.11ac Wi-Fi antenna. Amazon sells a $15 Ethernet adapter if you want to go the wired route for high-bandwidth activities like 4K streaming. The previous Fire TV unit offered 4K streaming at 30 frames per second (fps), but this latest update lets you do 4K streaming at 60fps and supports high dynamic range -- HDR10, to be exact. HDR provides a wider color gamut for more accurate colors and improved contrast -- brighter whites and darker blacks.

Like the Roku Streaming Stick+, the Fire TV does not support Dolby Vision, the competing HDR standard to HDR10. Both the Apple TV and the Google Chromecast Ultra support both HDR 10 and Dolby Vision, giving you access to more 4K HDR video sources. The Fire TV offers plenty of TV shows in 4K HDR from Amazon Video and Netflix, but movies are another matter. At the present time, the two biggest repositories of 4K HDR movies are iTunes and Vudu, neither of which you can get with the Fire TV.

The Fire TV does support Dolby Atmos though, which is Dolby’s 3D surround sound standard, but I couldn’t find any content with Atmos audio to play on the Fire TV. Vudu has a large library of movies with Atmos audio, but, again, you can’t access Vudu with a Fire TV.

What's in the box: Fire TV, remote, and power brick.

The truth is no single streaming box supports all of the latest and greatest AV standards, but the Fire TV is particularly hamstrung at the moment because without iTunes and Vudu, it lacks a great deal of the 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos content that is currently available. You can watch 4K HDR content from Prime Video along with other services including Netflix and YouTube, but they can’t match iTunes and Vudu for 4K HDR movies.

Setup and Performance

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Set up is plug-and-plug-and-play easy. Plug the Fire TV dongle into an HDMI port on the back of your TV, plug the power adapter into a wall outlet, select the right input on your TV, connect to your network, and you’ll be off and streaming.

The Alexa Voice Remote features the usual buttons -- play/pause, fast forward and rewind, home, menu, and back -- along with a navigation ring and a select button. At the top is the microphone button that lets you ask Alexa for help when pressed. You can ask Alexa to play a TV show or movie, or show you stuff from a particular actor or director, but it didn’t understand me when I asked it to play a specific episode of a show.

Alexa favors Amazon’s own shows; you can say, for example, “play Transparent” and the show will start playing where you last left off. Tell it to “play Stranger Things” and you’ll need to hit a button to start playing the episode. Thankfully, Amazon remembers your spot for Amazon and non-Amazon shows, and resumes play where you last left off. You can also tell the remote to play the next episode, rewind 30 seconds, and jump to 15 minutes. The remote also les you access Amazon Music; you can tell it to play an artist, an album, or a Pandora station.

You can also use the remote as a mini-Alexa and ask it other questions other than a show to watch or music to listen to. Ask about the weather and you’ll get a on-screen forecast. Ask about a Wikipedia a topic and you’ll get an on-screen Wikipedia entry, which your TV will then read aloud to you. Or ask it to tell you a joke.

Using Alexa to navigate Amazon’s video offerings is efficient and feels natural. You can also use Alexa to search the YouTube app but it doesn’t always work. I wanted to see highlights of Ohio State’s incredible comeback against Penn State but when I asked Alexa for “Ohio State highlights” my TV told me that “Your search did not match any videos or apps in our catalog.” When I said just “Ohio State,” I was shown a bunch of useless search results but at the bottom was an option called Search in apps, with YouTube listed as an option. It opened the YouTube app with search results shown for my query.

As good as the Alexa Voice Remote is, it lacks three seemingly fundamental buttons: volume up and down and a power button. You’ll need to keep your TV, receiver or sound bar remote around to control the volume, which is annoying because it doubles the chances of misplacing a remote when you are watching a show. The lack of a power button is less of an issue because the Fire TV goes into sleep mode after 20 minutes of inactivity. If you want to turn it off completely, however, you’ll need to unplug it.

You can ditch the Alexa remote -- therefore needing to keep track of only one remote for volume -- if you have an Echo device. With an Echo, you get hands-free voice control for the Fire TV.

When not using Alexa to search for content, you’ll find the Fire TV interface easy to navigate, especially if you embrace Amazon Video. Across the top you can choose to browse by category: Home, Your Videos, Movies, TV Shows, and Apps.  No matter which category you choose, you’ll be hit with a barrage of Amazon promotions. Below the large Amazon promotion at the top half of the screen is a grid of thumbnails you can navigate with the remote. In another move that favors Amazon’s own content, the Recents row shows individual Amazon shows but only the app name for anything other than Amazon. So, if you watched Stranger Things on Netflix, you’ll see only Netflix listed in the Recents row instead of a Stranger Things thumbnail.

Despite being heavily geared toward Amazon’s own content, navigating to your shows is far from a chore because the on-screen menu is responsive, with no lag between pressing a button on the remote and having your command take effect on the screen. But most likely, you’ll end up using Alexa to find what it is you’re looking for since it's easier.

Using a 5GHz Wi-Fi connection, videos loaded quickly and played smoothly. If you experience poor performance, the $15 Ethernet adapter should solve your troubles.

Purchasing Guide

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The Amazon Fire TV has an MSRP of $69.99, and since it just launched we've yet to see any discounts on it:

The Verdict

With Alexa onboard the Fire TV has the best-in-class voice remote, but given its spotty support for 4K HDR and Dolby surround standards, the Fire TV is best used for watching 4K TV shows rather than movies. It’s affordable and boasts a polished, intuitive interface and lets you stream shows in 4K HDR from Amazon and Netflix, but movie buffs are better off with Roku, at least until the situation settles with the competing 4K HDR and Dolby surround sound standards.

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