- Let's talk about some free apps for your Fire TV device,
could be a Fire Stick, Fire Cube, whatever the case may be.
I've got my top 10 free apps for that Fire device.
There are more than that
and I'll show you how to find some other ones.
But yeah, I've narrowed it down to my top 10.
So let's dive in.
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Hey everybody, Craig here for Reviews.org.
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All right, let's get into it.
I'm gonna do a quick tour of the Fire TV interface
just for anybody who is new to their Fire TV device.
Maybe you're a recent cord cutter.
Maybe you're switching from a different device.
I'll just show you a couple of things about
how to navigate around this.
So if you're already a Fire TV user,
go ahead and skip ahead to the next section
in the timeline below.
Right here, this is our home screen.
If you go through the home screen,
it's gonna give you a lot of recommendations,
stuff that Amazon wants you to watch
or things you might enjoy watching.
We're gonna skip past this home screen
and go to our apps screen.
So if I scroll over here,
you're gonna see there are a bunch of apps
that I most commonly use
that are right here on the home screen.
I'll show you how I put those there.
But right over here, we're gonna go to this apps tab.
Okay, so when I click on that,
it goes to Your Apps and Channels.
All right, so you can see that those apps
that were on the home screen are right up here up top.
Anything below that,
you have to come to a different screen to find.
But those six apps,
if you put them up above there
then they show up on your home screen.
So if I wanted Freevee to show up there,
I simply long hold
on the center button here on my remote
and put it up there with the others
and there you go.
If you wanna find some other apps,
then you can go to that same spot.
But instead of pressing on the button,
the select button,
I'm gonna come down here to it says,
Your Apps and Channels, some offers.
And then right down here you've got My Apps,
which will take you to the same page or Get More Apps.
And you can see a whole bunch of options here.
Yes, they have their featured stuff,
this is the stuff that they're gonna point you toward
or again, stuff that they think you might like.
Or you can come here to All Categories,
if there's something specific that you're looking for.
And of course if you know the actual app that you're after,
then you can actually search that
either by voice or by typing it in.
All right with that in mind,
let's go back to the My Apps screen.
All 10 of my apps are gonna be right here
below that top line.
And like I said, I'll mention a few others.
But let's go through the top 10 free apps.
As far as I'm concerned,
the ones that you really ought to have
if you've got a Fire TV device
The first one we start with is Freevee.
Freevee used to be known as IMDB TV.
Okay, which was quite a mouthful.
Amazon bought IMDB a while ago,
and they created IMDB TV as a place to store free titles
that they didn't wanna put in the Prime Video app.
The Prime Video app, of course you have to pay for,
and you probably are if you're using a Fire TV device.
But we'll leave that aside for now.
With Freevee if you pop into there,
then you're gonna see a bunch of titles
that you can watch for free.
The difference is that these are going to be
commercial supported.
But with Freevee,
just like most all of these free apps,
if you're not paying for it,
then that means that you are gonna have
to watch commercials.
That being said, there are some great titles in here
that you're not gonna find on Prime Video.
Some that you won't find anywhere else.
And when you pop into those titles,
you'll see on that timeline there,
those little dots on there,
those represent commercial breaks.
So all these titles are gonna have those commercial breaks.
Some will have more, some will have fewer.
It's just up to you
how much you're willing to sit through commercial wise.
But Freevee goes at the top of the list for Fire TV users
because well frankly
it's kind of built into your Fire TV anyway.
This is an Amazon product.
And because it's an Amazon product,
yeah they do a pretty good job of pulling together titles
that you are actually gonna want to watch.
So it's definitely a good one to browse through
every once in a while.
All right, coming down to pick number two.
This is kind of weird, right?
The Roku Channel.
The Roku Channel is my number two pick,
and it's not on a Roku.
But yeah, you can get it on your Fire TV device.
And the Roku channel is honestly really excellent.
It's one that I've been touting for years
and they've only gotten better as time has gone on.
The Roku Channel does a great job of pulling together
all sorts of free stuff,
whether it's live TV channels,
not the same cable channels you're used to,
but yes you can get some live TV stuff,
you can get some on demand stuff.
They even have Roku Originals now.
If you recall a couple years ago
there was a streaming service called Quibi.
Quibi didn't last very long.
It was not very well thought out
but some of the content was pretty good.
And Roku bought that content when Quibi folded,
and thus was born the Roku Original.
And since then they've made their own originals as well.
In fact recently they made the Weird Al biopic,
which is just as weird
and just as hilarious as you would think.
Next up on our list is Peacock.
Peacock is a weird one, and I'm gonna tell you why.
Because Peacock is technically a premium app, right?
This is NBCUniversal's app.
But the thing is, there are two sides to Peacock.
You can do the free version or the premium version.
In fact, there are two premium versions.
But it is really nice
that they've got a whole bunch of free stuff on here.
So because it's NBCUniversal,
they've got a great library of titles
that you can go through.
The only tricky thing about this one is that,
you know like I said before,
if you're watching something for free,
yes, you'll have to watch commercials.
But the other thing is
that if you're on the free version of Peacock,
just be aware that they're not going to hide the titles
that are on the premium version.
Basically the idea is
they want you to see how awesome their library is,
and then when you click on something it says,
oh, this is for premium members,
and try to get you to subscribe that way.
So there are some frustrations with it that way.
However, as far as NBC stuff goes, it's kind of a must have.
It's really great,
especially if you're into wrestling.
This is the must see destination for wrestling content.
There are some other sports stuff on here of course as well,
but the WWE is owned by NBCUniversal as far as I know.
And so they've got
a whole bunch of wrestling content on here.
Next up is Spotify.
Now I'm using Spotify
as kind of a placeholder for all sorts of music apps.
There are other music apps that you can put on here.
This is the one I use.
But whatever music app you use
there's a good chance that it is available
on your streaming device as well.
But yeah, Spotify,
this one's kind of a an easy to explain choice.
This is a no-brainer if you enjoy music,
then Spotify is going to be a big deal for you.
Now you might think, well, why do I need it here?
I've got it on my phone, I don't need it on my TV.
Well, the nice thing is your TV,
depending on your sound setup,
may have a better sound system than
well that little phone that you carry in your pocket.
And it's also nice if you're,
you know, say hosting a party or something.
Than putting music on the TV makes a lot of sense
in a situation like that.
Frankly, I've had enough situations
in the last six or seven years
where I've really been glad that I had Spotify on my TV
that I couldn't not recommend it.
But let's move on to a couple of classic free apps,
Tubi and Pluto.
I'm kind of lumping these together
because they're almost mirror images of each other.
Tubi is the first free app that I remember ever seeing.
It started out as kind of a Netflix imitator.
It was like Netflix with commercials,
which I guess is going to be a thing now here pretty soon.
Anyway, it has since evolved,
but this is one of the originals and still one of the best.
Tubi does a great job of pulling together titles,
again that you'll actually want to see,
kind of like Freevee.
And when I say that it has evolved a little bit,
what I mean by that is
it started out as Netflix with commercials,
but now you can come up here,
let's say over here to Live TV
and see that yeah, it's got a giant live TV section.
Now again, much like on the Roku Channel,
these are not the live TV channels you're used to
if you're on cable,
but they're kind of offshoots
of a lot of those channels much of the time.
So whether you're looking for
news, or sports, or entertainment, whatever the case may be,
if you prefer to have a live TV approach
with the kind of time grid on here
watching things on their schedule,
then it's a great way to do it.
But Tubi was definitely built on the on-demand side
and the live TV side was added later.
But now if we go to our next pick,
which is Pluto TV,
it was built in the opposite way.
Pluto TV was kind of
the original live TV cable simulator, right?
So this is free live TV
it's all obviously commercial supported, right?
And if you do pop in here,
yeah you'll see there are a ton of live TV channels on here.
The really nice thing about Pluto
is that they have their live channels
sorted into categories, right?
And so if you're looking for Christmas stuff,
if you're looking for entertainment options,
news, whatever the case may be,
it's really easy to find them
just with that directory kind of on the left.
Now, if I come up here to the top,
you'll see I'm on Live TV right now,
but with Pluto TV,
I can also go to On Demand.
And like you can see,
they have a lot of content that is pretty cool.
You know,
this is not the bottom of the barrel stuff
that you find on some free apps.
And once again, I can come over here to the left
and sort by the category that I wanna be looking for.
So between Freevee and Tubi and Pluto,
you're definitely gonna find something you wanna watch.
It is not actually necessary to pay for any content
between some of these.
But we do have a few more apps to go through.
Okay, what about kid content?
There are a few things that I could point out.
You'll see down here I've got PBS Kids.
My kids actually use that quite a bit.
I like PBS Kids a lot.
but I wanna point out the Lego Channel.
This has been a revelation in our house,
and maybe for you as well if you have kids.
The Lego Channel is exactly that.
It is a Lego channel devoted entirely to Lego stuff.
And you come in here,
you can see they've been making Lego content for a while.
They've got quite a library built up.
And you can go into a specific type of library
or you can come over here to Skip this Screen,
and just see everything that's on offer there.
So there are kind of the animated Lego shows.
There's also, you know,
people building Legos, and people talking about Legos and,
Lego, is that the?
The plural of Lego is Lego?
Who cares?
Point being, if you are a parent, you've got kids,
and you want kind of a fun and safe channel
for them to browse through,
I love the Lego Channel.
Switching gears a little bit, let's go to Plex.
Okay, Plex is one of the most interesting free apps
out there
because again, kind of like Tubi and like Pluto TV,
it started as one thing and has built on that
and morphed into something greater than it once was.
The basic idea behind Plex is that
this gives you a place to upload your own content
and watch it and stream it wherever you happen to be.
So what I mean is,
let's say you've got a library of DVDs or family videos
or bootleg music copies
that you've had since the '90s or whatever.
You can create a Plex account online,
upload that content,
and then it appears in your Plex app on your Fire TV.
So you can see if I come down here to movies,
I've added a few things of my own,
like my cherished DVD of "The Last Starfighter",
or the interview that I did with the author Jim Butcher
for a different channel.
Anyway, so I can upload my own videos here.
I can do the same thing with my music,
I can do the same thing with my photos,
and that's the bread and butter of Plex.
That is what sets it apart and what makes it really cool.
Now that being said,
they also since have added live TV
and on demand movies and shows.
You can even get music from title on here.
And while they do have a few really good titles on here,
I will say that for the most part
the selection is not quite what you would expect to get
on some of those higher end versions,
the Tubis, the Plutos, the Freevees.
Still that's not what sets it apart,
so I'm not gonna take any points off
for not having quite as good a library.
All right, just a couple more.
Let's talk about the native apps
that Amazon puts on their Fire TV devices,
News and Free.
Let's start with News.
News is one that I've been loving for a few years now.
I really enjoy what they do here.
Essentially what they do
is they collate all of the free news content out there,
'cause there is quite a bit of it,
and they put it all in one location.
So you can come up here to Local News
and get your local stuff.
So you know,
I'm here in the Salt Lake area so I get Utah News.
Or I come up here to Trending,
and they're gonna pull together all sorts of stuff
from lots of different sources,
and you can watch,
you know, little clips that they have on here.
You can also go here to Channels.
All right, so if there is a certain channel
that you enjoy the very most or maybe a group of them,
then you can make them your favorites
and then they show up kind of on that front page.
But just looking through here,
you can see just how many,
just how many apps they have available.
It's a huge selection.
And then you get down here to Local News Channels,
again, there's a ton of them.
So not just here in the Salt Lake area
but in surrounding areas as well,
Boise, Denver, Las Vegas.
And it'll look similar to you
depending on what area you're in.
And then we get to Free.
I saved this one for last
just because it is kind of the newest thing
that Amazon is making native on their Fire TV devices.
I come in here to Free.
What is that?
Well, it's a whole bunch of free stuff,
including some of the content
that we've already talked about,
stuff from Freevee and Tubi and all of that stuff.
You know, things that like Tubi recommends these titles.
Okay, so Tubi is gonna put stuff on there.
Obviously Freevee,
because it's Amazon-owned,
is gonna be featured prominently here.
Anyway, so point being,
there's a lot of free content for you to watch right here.
And this is also the only place I've seen
where you can sort apps to download
by whether they're free or not.
And they're not gonna have everything on here,
but you'll see this category Free Apps on Fire TV,
a lot of the ones that we've already talked about,
plus a few others as well.
And there you go,
10 apps that I think you need to have on your Fire TV
if you've got one.
10 free apps that should have you set up
for the next year at least.
If you don't wanna pay for any content,
you're gonna have plenty to go on right here.
And I haven't even talked about a few of the others.
I skipped YouTube.
YouTube's pretty important,
says the guy you're watching on YouTube right now.
Crackle is excellent.
FilmRise is one that I've talked about in previous videos,
we're skipping past that today.
Point being there are others out there as well.
But I hope you liked my picks for the top 10.
Let me know what you thought in the comments below.
If you feel like I missed any,
you wanna make the case for others leaping into the top 10,
then go ahead and do that in the comments.
Don't forget to like and subscribe everybody.
Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.