- So you got yourself a new Fire Stick or a Fire Cube
or a Fire TV, whatever, and you wanna know how to use it.
Well, frankly, using it is pretty simple.
You're gonna get around just fine on your own.
However, I've got a few tips and tricks that will,
I think, make your trip into Fire TVdom a little easier,
a little more pleasant,
and a little more customized to your taste.
So let's go over seven of my top tips
for new Fire TV device owners.
All right, let's dive in.
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Like I said, I've got seven tips and tricks
for somebody who's just pulling
their first Fire TV device out of the box.
Okay, now these are beginner's tips.
We're not going into advanced features like sideloading.
I'm not even gonna go really into gaming
on this particular video.
We're trying to make this really simple
just for somebody who wants to enjoy
their streaming content in the best way possible.
So with that in mind, the first thing you need to do
once you've got your Fire TV device plugged in
is to open up the Fire TV app.
If you don't have it downloaded, get it downloaded.
Grab your smartphone, download the Fire TV app,
and voila, it looks just like that.
What is it?
Well, it's basically a remote.
Well, why do I need that?
I've got a remote right here.
I don't need it on my phone.
Ah ha, well, you may not need it very much,
and you may not need it so much in the future,
but especially when you're first setting up
your Fire TV device, it pays to grab the app.
And why is that?
Well, when you first get started with your Fire TV device,
and this goes for any device,
whether it's a Roku or an Apple TV,
a Chromecast, whatever,
when you first try to get your device set up,
you're gonna be doing a lot of logins.
You're gonna be doing email addresses
and usernames and passwords, all that stuff.
And it pays to have this handy.
And the reason for that is right up here in this corner,
the little keyboard symbol.
When you come across a login page for instance
and it's asking you for your email address
and your password, it can get really laborious
to try to click through the keyboard on your remote.
So you pull open your phone
and you can type it out on your phone much, much faster.
Now, this may not seem like that big a deal, right?
It's just an email address and password.
Well, after you've done it 5, 6, 10 times,
depending on how many apps you're logging into,
yeah, it can get very, very boring, very frustrating.
When you mess up one of the words,
you have to go all the way back
with the little clicker on the remote.
Not a lot of fun.
Now, beyond that, it's not just about typing in passwords,
it's also about, well,
basically having a remote anytime, anywhere.
If this remote ever gets lost or if it runs out of batteries
and you don't really wanna walk upstairs to go get new ones,
whatever, then having the remote available on your phone
is just a convenience
that you may want to use going forward.
And who knows, maybe you'll like it more
than the actual remote.
Tip number two is learn to love your home button.
Now, yeah, if you click on the home button,
it takes you back to the homepage.
But if you hold that home button for about two seconds,
it'll bring up this screen right here
with some of the most used options that you'll need.
So you can switch profiles, check out your apps,
find new apps, put it to sleep, do some screen mirroring.
We'll talk about that in just a moment.
And go to your settings.
This is gonna be very important.
You should spend a lot of time in settings
when you first set up the device.
So simple, easy, get to know that home button.
I'm gonna be using it a lot during this video.
For instance, tip number three is getting rid of autoplay.
Okay, so I'm gonna go back to my home screen here.
And if I come down here to one of these titles,
let's take "The Rings of Power".
Okay, that's come out pretty recently.
Yeah, it starts playing the trailer pretty loudly.
I hope you can still hear me over that.
So what are we supposed to do about that?
Well, again, I'm gonna long hold on that home button.
Head over to my settings.
Let's go to preferences.
Now, when we go to preferences,
we're gonna come down here to featured content,
and you'll see, allow video autoplay and audio autoplay.
So maybe you don't mind
that it starts playing a little bit of video,
but you don't want it to be so loud.
You can just turn off the audio.
If you don't want either of them on, you turn them both off.
Pretty simple, right?
But now if I go to that home screen
and I come down to "The Rings of Power",
it's not going to start playing that trailer.
It's not going to annoy me with noise
that I didn't actually ask for yet.
And that brings us to our next tip
which is also about unwanted noise for some people.
When you go through the Fire TV menu,
you'll hear a lot of clicking.
Every time you go somewhere else,
it's got that click on, right?
Now, some people like that,
they like that kind of audio feedback
when they're clicking buttons to know that it's working.
Other people really hate it.
If you're somebody who hates it,
again, let's go to that long hold on the home button.
Come over here to settings.
This time I'll go to display and sounds,
go down here to audio, and turn off navigation sounds.
Now, as I go through,
every time I click a button, silence.
Okay, so again, you may prefer to have that on,
some people do, but if you wanna turn it off, very simple.
Let's do a couple more things from the settings.
Okay, I'm gonna go back to my settings here,
and I'm gonna come down here to accessibility.
Now, there are a lot of accessibility options.
You can see here closed captions, voice view,
that sort of thing.
I'm actually gonna go look down here at screen magnifier.
This can really come in handy for,
well, frankly somebody who needs a screen magnifier.
Maybe your eyes weren't what they used to be.
Maybe your TV is very small
and you need that screen magnification.
Well, you can turn it on from here and that's great,
but pay attention to this screen right here.
It's actually gonna give you some cool tips
for how to use the screen magnification.
The one thing that I wanna mention to you
right up top is hold back and fast forward,
that enables and disables your screen magnifier
wherever you are in your menus, okay?
So I can turn it off there.
I go back to my home screen.
Well, if I hold back and fast forward at the same time,
you can see it turns on the screen magnifier
all by itself, like that.
Like I said, there are some other shortcuts
that you'll want to get to know.
If screen magnification is something
that's gonna be useful to you, start memorizing that list.
It'll really come in handy.
All right, we're almost done with the settings.
Okay, we're gonna go back to the settings one more time,
and we're gonna turn off data tracking.
What is data tracking?
Well, it's exactly that.
It's your Fire TV device keeping track what you do,
what you watch, how you act on your Fire TV device.
Mostly they do this for advertising purposes.
That data that they collect is very, very valuable to them
'cause they can sell it off to advertisers
who want to advertise to you specifically.
Now, if you don't want them to track your data,
very simple, you just go over here to preferences,
come down here to privacy settings,
and you can see, these are all turned on.
Device usage data, I can turn that off.
Collect app usage data, turn that off.
Interest-based ads, turn that off.
Now, it's clear why you might wanna turn that off,
for privacy reasons, right?
You may actually want to leave this on though
because if you're gonna be served up ads,
some of us might say,
"Hey it's worth it to get ads
"that I might actually care about
"instead of ones that I really, really don't."
That's a judgment call on your part.
I'm just showing you how to do it
if you'd like to turn that tracking off,
'cause that's one thing about the Fire TV ecosystem
is that you're gonna see quite a few ads.
Right under here, under recently watched,
right there is sponsored,
and that sponsored list is now different than what it was
when I turned off the data tracking.
For our last tip today, let's talk about screen mirroring.
That's where you take another device like your phone,
like your laptop for instance, your tablet,
and you mirror it with your Fire TV device.
Now, I'll tell you how to do it,
and then we'll talk about why you might want to.
Again, I'm gonna long hold on my home button
and go right over here to mirroring.
Make Amazon Fire TV cube discoverable to nearby devices.
Great.
So I turn that on, and now it'll say, all right,
so if you've got a device
that's able to do screen mirroring,
see if you can find your Fire TV Cube
or Fire TV device, a Cube in my case, on your app list.
Okay, so on my phone,
I'm gonna open up my settings and go to screen mirroring.
I'm gonna go to my connection and sharing, screencast,
and I wanna search for some display devices.
Now that my Fire TV device is in pairing mode,
there it is right on my list.
Craig's Fire TV Cube.
Okay, so I want to start recording or casting.
In this case, I'm gonna cast my phone screen
up to my Fire TV cube.
Now, why would you wanna do this?
Maybe there's some media on your phone
that you want to show on the big screen.
Maybe it's a movie that you have saved locally
on your laptop or your phone or your tablet.
Maybe you have something going on.
You've got family over and you wanna bore them
with your photo albums on the big screen.
Fantastic.
You can do that right here from your device.
And to stop doing that, I just go back to my device,
go to where the screencast is located,
and disconnect from my Fire TV device.
Pretty simple.
Now it's done display mirroring,
and back to my regular Fire TV screen.
So there you go.
A few tips and tricks for you
with your brand new Fire TV device.
Like I said, you're gonna wanna spend quite a bit of time
in the settings menu,
check out some of what is available there
for you to do on your own.
I highly recommend at least skimming through
each of these menus to see what you can customize,
see what you can change to make your Fire TV device
as good as possible for you.
And if you have any other tips or tricks,
please drop 'em in the comments below.
We'd love to hear 'em.
I could have made a list of about 30 of 'em,
but I wanted to keep it reasonable.
So anyway, hit those comments.
Don't forget to like and subscribe,
and don't forget to drop by on Fridays, 2:00 PM Eastern
for the live streams that I do on this channel right here.
I would love to see you there.
Thanks for coming by everybody.