Amazon Fire Stick TV Review Why Motorhomes Love It
Amazon Firestick TV
£29.99
Pros
- HD Streaming features (4k depending on model)
- Thousands of movies and TV series
- Portable and easy to connect
- Voice Controlled
Cons
- Slight bias content towards Amazon Prime subscribers
In this post we review the Amazon Fire Stick TV to see whether it will prove useful on your motorhome trip.
The Amazon Fire Stick TV is a great choice if you’re looking for a capable and affordable streaming option for your motorhome TV. This streaming stick has a decent interface and great range of app support to keep you entertained on those days or evenings when you hanker after your favourite TV shows or movies.
With a number of variants available to choose from including the range topping Amazon Fire Stick 4k Max to the lesser priced Amazon Fire Stick Lite all offer great value with similar capabilities.
What does it do?
The Amazon Fire Stick TV lets you enjoy streaming content in Full HD. This is great for those times when your regular motorhome aerial just can’t get a signal. I’ve often ended up in locations where you just aren’t able to to get a TV signal. In these instances then the Amazon Fire Stick can come to the rescue. Now of course it does mean that you need to have a wi-fi signal of some sort but thankfully most campsites tend to have internet access and offer you this for free.
Thousands of apps, Alexa skills and channels—including BBC iPlayer, Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, Now, Disney+, ITV, All 4, My5 and more are available at your fingertips so even the most avid TV camper will be catered for.
You can also watch Live TV, news, and sport with subscriptions to Eurosport, ITV Hub, Sky News as well as access to films and TV programmes from apps such as ITV Hub, All 4, Pluto TV, YouTube.
It also means it turns any TV into a smart TV so as long as you have a HDMI socket on your TV then you’re good to go.
With the ability to listen to music too by streaming on Amazon Music, Spotify and others you can listen to a whole host of podcasts and artists.
Oh and did I mention it has Alexa built in too? This means you can press and hold the Voice button and ask Alexa to find, launch and control content. Easily search and enjoy hundreds of thousands of films, TV programmes, apps and games. Alexa can also play music, answer questions, read the news, check the weather and set alarms.
The Lite Version is usually priced around £29.99 but you can often get it on a deal for under £20 which is great value.
Why motorhome users loves it
Go back Forty or fifty years and your fellow campers travelling in motorhomes and caravans would probably have been tuning into a small transistor radio and delight at the crackling sounds as their favourite songs came hissing out of the lone, small crackly speaker.
Go back Thirty years and if you were lucky a small portable television would be providing you with the latest episodes of coronation street for your evening entertainment as you settled on the pitch.
Go back 20 years and you would have delighted at the convenience of DVD’s
Go Back 10 years and alongside your latest motorhome HD TV with built in DVD player and if you could afford it a rooftop satellite system to provide you with a vast amount of live TV choice would have been your go to option to keep you entertained for hours on end during your camping trip.
Over the last 10 years digital streaming has come to the fore, just look how Netflix soon engineered the demise of Blockbuster VHS video. With that came the introduction of media streaming devices such as the Amazon Fire Stick TV, which was first introduced in 2014. It’s evolved through to todays offering that provides you with as much music, movies, live tv, catch up tv and entertainment that you could possibly consume in a life time let alone during a week away in Scarborough.
And the reason why Motorhome and caravan users love it? Convenience is the answer. An all in one solution that’s light, compact and easy to use. No fiddly aerials for terrestrial TV, no expensive satellite systems for multi choice channel viewing. Of course there’s always a need for access to wi-fi to stream but this is negated mainly by almost everybody having data access on their mobile phone which there able to share.
What you get in the box
Along with the main Amazon Fire Stick TV iteself unit the box contains a HDMI extender, a USB cable and plug and remote control with batteries.
Design
The design is a small, black in colour stick that is only 8.6cm long and 3cm wide. It’s lightweight at around 32g, The HDMI extender provides an extension to the device if your TV design prevents the Fire Stick plugging directly into the HDMI port on the TV. The device is designed to enter low power mode when it goes to sleep to reduce any energy consumption. Because of the portability of the device you can easily unplug it from your motorhome TV and use it within your home for when you’re not travelling.
Usability
The whole system is controlled by the slim sleek remote and the interface is extremely easy to navigate. There is a search bar for finding content or you can browse by popular categories or open the apps that you have installed. Library is where you can find your watch list, purchases and rentals. Of course you could always ask Alexa to play your favourite programme.
Summary
The Amazon Fire Stick TV is a great solution for motorhome and caravan users everywhere. As long as you have a network connection then you have access to TV. I have one permanently in my motorhome (so I never forget it) and find it a great supplement to my other entertainment options.
Would I be able to download films and tv programmes at home to the Firestick and then watch them on a tv in the caravan?
You can’t directly load data e.g. films or songs etc to a firestick. The firestick allows you to download apps such as netflix, amazon prime etc and then watch them on your caravan TV.
You could upload films onto a USB memory stick then play them back via your TV’s USB port depending on your TV. That way you wouldn’t need to stream or be online but that’s a long winded way of going about it unless you already have movies stored in a digital format such as on a computer hard drive.