Last week, I decided to spend a few days with my mom back at her place and watch some football with her. She lives in a house that does not have cable or satellite, and only has an antenna for OTA stations in the area. For streaming, she has an Amazon Fire TV Stick for watching Sling TV and Hulu.
This would be the first weekend in a while (outside of staying in a hotel) that I had gone without using my Apple TV. It’s a device that I use nearly every single day for watching TV shows and movies.
So, how did I survive an entire weekend without my Apple TV? Believe it or not, it was not as hard as it sounds.
Don’t get me wrong, the Fire TV Stick is a great little streaming stick and I still prefer my Apple TV. However, when it comes to watching some shows like Seinfeld or Last Man Standing on it, it’s actually not that bad. Content does not play as fast as it did on my Apple TV, but I can wait a little longer, as most of the time that I am using it, I am generally on my iPhone or MacBook Pro doing other things.
The one issue that I had with the Fire TV Stick was pausing shows. An example of this was going to the bathroom and then finding out that the Fire TV Stick went into screensaver mode. It would not be an issue if the Fire TV Stick had a way to immediately get back to what you were watching from the remote, but it does not.
Instead, you are sent back to the main Hulu menu and have to go to the “Keep Watching” menu in order to get back to what you were watching previously. It is not an issue that I have seen with the Apple TV and tvOS.
Although it is not ideal, I did survive a weekend without my Apple TV. In the future, I hope to be able to use my Apple TV for watching content.
Another good thing about the Fire TV Stick is that you can get the Apple TV app on the Fire TV Stick, so if I did want to access my catalog of movies or TV shows on it, I could do so.
All in all, using the Fire TV Stick over this past weekend was tough but was something that I could manage. I can make it work every now and then, but it is not something that I want to get accustomed to. I’d give the entire experience 3/4 stars, altogether. It wasn’t perfect, but then again, it could have been much worse.
Rating: 3/4 stars
