Chapter 6
IN THIS CHAPTER
Installing apps for movie and TV streaming services
Searching Fire TV for movies and TV shows
Taking a look at some free streaming services
Controlling movie and TV show playback
Adding a second screen to your streaming experience
Fire TV sure has a ton of tricks up its sleeves, and I take you through all of them — such as playing music, viewing photos, and surfing the web — later in the book. However, when you get right down to it, you probably bought your Fire TV device to do just two things — watch movies and TV shows — am I right? I knew it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, because Fire TV excels at streaming video content.
So, this chapter is devoted exclusively to using Fire TV to watch movies and TV show episodes. You learn how to install streaming apps, search for content, handle subscriptions, control playback, and much more. I’ll wait here while you pop some popcorn, and then we’ll get the show started.
Although your Fire TV comes with a few Amazon apps preinstalled — particularly Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Photos, and Amazon Music — before you can watch or even check out any other streaming content, you need to install the appropriate app on your Fire TV device.
Here’s the procedure to run through to install an app on Fire TV:
Choose the Get button, shown in Figure 6-1.
Choosing Get authorizes Amazon to “purchase” the app through your Amazon account. All movie and TV apps are free to download, however, so you won’t be charged anything.
Note, too, that if you’ve previously purchased a Fire TV app (say, using a different Fire TV device), then you see a Download button instead of the Get button.
Fire TV downloads and then installs the app. When the install is complete, you see the Open button, as shown in Figure 6-2. In the lower-right corner of the screen, you also see a notification that the app is ready to launch (again, see Figure 6-2; note that this notification only appears onscreen for a few seconds).
Choose Open or, if the notification is still onscreen, press Menu.
Fire TV runs the app.
After you settle in to the Fire TV experience, it doesn’t take long before you realize there is a ton of stuff to watch! If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you’ve got hundreds of TV shows and thousands of movies to check out. And the more streaming apps you install, the more content is at the tip of your fingers (or the tip of your tongue). Just installing YouTube alone gives you access to several billion (that’s right, I said billion) videos, mostly of cats.
When you realize just how much content you have at your disposal, the very next realization is usually, “How in the name of Jeff Bezos am I supposed to find what I want?” Fire TV helps you out by displaying your most recently used apps in the Recent row of the Home screen, but many people new to Fire TV complain that they seem to spend great chunks of their precious leisure time scrolling through the Fire TV interface to find the app, show, or movie they want.
Fortunately, there’s a better way: Fire TV offers three different techniques to search for the content you want to watch:
To perform a global search of the Amazon catalog on Fire TV, press Home to return to the Fire TV Home screen (if you’re not there already), and then choose the Search tab (the magnifying glass icon to the left of the Home tab; see Figure 6-3).
After you have the Search screen displayed, you have three ways to initiate a search:
Whatever method you prefer, the trick is to use some combination of keywords that tells Fire TV what you’re looking for. There are five main types of keywords you can use:
Some searches require only one keyword, but most of the time you’ll want to combine two or more keywords to narrow your search. Here are some examples:
The secret to efficient searching is to make your searches specific enough that you find what you’re looking for, but not so wordy that Fire TV shrugs its shoulders and gives up. For example, this search doesn’t work very well:
However, this pithier version works just fine:
If you run a voice search and Fire TV isn’t certain what you said, it displays a list of possible searches, as shown in Figure 6-4. Choose the search text you want Fire TV to run. If you don’t see the search request you want, press Menu to type the search text instead.
One final note about voice searching using Fire TV Cube (or an Alexa-enabled smart speaker): When Alexa returns multiple results, those results are numbered, as shown in Figure 6-5. You can use the following voice commands to navigate this list:
In the previous section, I mention several keyword types you can use for searching, including the name of an app, the title of a show, and a content description. I also mentioned that you can combine keywords, so you may think you can perform a search like this:
That command works *if* the app has added its content to the Amazon Universal Search catalog. Otherwise, the command fails because Fire TV doesn’t know how to search within the app. I explain how to search within apps in the next section, but for now I can tell you that there are (at least as I write this) three apps that Fire TV does know how to search: Amazon Music, Silk (Amazon’s Fire TV web browser), and YouTube.
To send a search request to one of these apps, run a global Fire TV search as I describe in the previous section. In the search results, you see a row titled Search in Apps, which includes a tile each for YouTube, Internet (that’s the Silk browser), and Amazon Music, as shown in Figure 6-6. Choose one of these apps, and Fire TV passes along your search request to the app.
You can also use voice commands to search Amazon Music and YouTube (for some reason, Silk doesn’t respond to voice commands):
I mention in the preceding section that Fire TV can’t search within most apps (with Amazon Music, Silk, and YouTube being the exceptions). That’s not a huge problem, however, because most streaming apps implement their own search feature. For example, Figure 6-7 shows the search interface for the YouTube app.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, just to keep us all on our toes, each app’s search feature is slightly different, so there’s no standard procedure I can give you. Fortunately, almost all apps do implement two search techniques:
It’s most unfortunate that a significant portion of people who are new to Fire TV believe that after they’ve purchased a Fire TV device, the entire world of streaming media is available to them without incurring any extra charges. Would that it were true! So, I hope I’m not dashing your hopes too cruelly when I tell you that most streaming services require a paid subscription.
You may find everything you need to be a happy couch potato in Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, and the other free streaming services I mention in the previous section. However, it’s more likely that there will be premium cable channels (such as HBO and Showtime) and live news and sports channels that reside in your “Must Have” list. That means you’re going to have to pay a monthly subscription to one or more streaming services to get the content you want.
How you subscribe depends on how you navigate to the content. For example, if you install and then open an app that requires a subscription, you usually see a Subscribe button, as shown in Figure 6-8. If subscription content comes up in a Fire TV search, then you usually see a Watch with [Service] 30-Day Free Trial button (where [Service] is the name of the streaming service), as shown in Figure 6-9.
However, instead of relying on the Fire TV interface to initiate your subscription, it’s usually easier and faster to go to the streaming service’s website and set up your subscription there. Be sure to sign up for whatever free trial is offered, just to make sure you like the service before paying for it.
One of the major benefits of being an Amazon Prime member is that you get access to tons of movies and TV shows at no extra charge through the Amazon Prime Video app. It’s a binge-watcher’s paradise. If, on the other hand, you’re not a member of Amazon Prime, you can still access all those shows, but you need to either buy or rent them on your Fire TV device using Amazon Instant Video.
Here are the steps to follow to buy or rent a movie or TV show:
Choose either the Buy button or the Rent button.
Amazon uses your 1-Click payment method to charge the rental or purchase to your account.
When it’s time to watch a movie or TV show, you first need to locate the content you want to view. Fire TV gives you a bunch of options:
When you choose a movie or TV show, you first see a details screen that describes the content. Figure 6-10 shows a typical details screen for Amazon content, which offers the following controls:
For non-Amazon content, choosing the movie or TV show opens the app of the streaming service that offers the content, where you usually see at least a Play button.
Use your Alexa Voice Remote (or the remote feature in the Fire TV mobile app) to control playback using the following buttons:
While rewinding at medium speed, press Rewind again to continuously rewind at high speed.
While rewinding at high speed, press Rewind again to switch to the low-speed rewind.
While fast-forwarding at medium speed, press Fast Forward again to continuously fast-forward at high speed.
While fast-forwarding at high speed, press Fast Forward again to switch to the low-speed fast-forward.
If you’re more of a voice person, you can control playback using the following commands:
While you’re watching a TV show or movie, you can press the Menu button to see a list of options for the content, as shown in Figure 6-11. Depending on the content, you see some or all of the following:
It’s happened to all of us a million times: You’re watching a TV show or movie and you think, “Hey, what’s that actor’s name?” or “Ooh, I like this music — I wonder who does it?” Normally, you either have to wait until the end of the show to get your answer in the credits (if you’re lucky), or you pull out your smartphone and start Googling the actors or Shazaming the music.
Fortunately, Fire TV offers a better method. It’s called X-Ray, and it enables you to take a quick peek at info related to the current scene (X-Ray Quick View) or the overall show (Full Screen X-Ray). X-Ray is powered by the famous (and famously comprehensive) Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
First, note that not all shows support X-Ray, although a remarkable number do. To know whether X-Ray is available, check out the show details. If you see the X-Ray label, as shown in Figure 6-12, then you’re good to go.
When you’re watching an X-Ray-able show and you just need to know more about what’s going on, display X-Ray Quick View by pressing the navigation ring’s Up button on your Alexa Voice Remote. Fire TV continues to play the show, but along the bottom of the screen you see the current scene’s cast members and a tile for any music that plays in the current scene. Figure 6-13 shows an example. To hide the X-Ray info, press the Down button.
If you’re really curious about the show, display Full Screen X-Ray by pressing the Up button twice (or by pressing Play/Pause and then pressing Up). Fire TV pauses the show and displays Full Screen X-Ray, as shown in Figure 6-14. There are four tabs you can traverse here:
When you’re done, you can return to the show by pressing the remote’s Play/Pause button.
If you’ve got TV shows or movies on your mobile device, wouldn’t it be great to watch that content on your big-screen TV? It sure would, and it just may be possible. Fire TV supports a feature called mirroring that takes whatever is displayed on a mobile device screen and also displays it on the Fire TV device. Sounds extremely cool, doesn’t it? But there are some catches:
To get started, first put your Fire TV Stick device into Display Mirroring mode. You have two choices:
Now turn to your mobile device, which should be within about 30 feet of your Fire TV Stick, registered to the same Amazon account, and connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Open the mobile device’s settings and activate the device’s screen mirroring option. The name of the option varies depending on the version of Android your device uses, but here are some possibilities to search for:
When you’re done mirroring the mobile device screen to your Fire TV Stick, press any button on the Alexa Voice Remote to take your Fire TV Stick out of Display Mirroring mode.
In modern streaming media lingo, a second screen experience means you watch the media on a main screen (such as your TV), and you use a second screen (such as tablet or smartphone) to control playback and display extra info about the media, such as the cast and music info I talk about earlier (see “Peeking at Cast or Music Info”).
The second screen experience is what all the cool kids are doing nowadays, so if you want to be cool, too, then you need the following:
If you’ve checked off all those boxes, then your first step is to configure your Fire TV device to use a second screen device. Choose Settings ⇒ Display & Sounds, and then turn the Second Screen Notifications setting to On.
Now pick up your second screen device, use Amazon Prime Video to open the TV show or movie you want to watch, and then tap the Watch on Fire TV button.
The content begins playing on your Fire TV, while your second screen device displays playback controls and X-Ray info (if available) about the content.
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