Alright, you finally cut the cord
and you get yourself an Amazon Fire device,
a Fire TV, a Fire Stick 4K, a Fire Cube,
whatever the case is.
Now you've got Amazon Fire TV ready to go.
And the good news is whatever device you've got,
there's a ton of free content out there,
you don't have to now sign up for a ton of paid services,
you can, but you don't have to.
So today we're gonna be talking about
my top 10 picks for free content on your Amazon Fire TV,
let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Before we get started, if you are interested
in winning a 55-inch Insignia Smart TV,
powered by Amazon Fire TV,
you can check that out in the description below.
There are contest rules,
you can get multiple entries for that.
So just hit the link in the description,
and enter to win that TV.
Now today for the Amazon Fire TV,
what we're gonna be doing is going through the apps,
what I'm not gonna do
is do a whole tour of the interface,
I'm not gonna review the devices themselves.
All I'm gonna be doing is looking
at our top 10 free apps.
So if you want to look for anything else,
hit this icon above me,
there are some other Amazon Fire videos that we have,
if you want something in a little bit different genre.
Now then, first thing I'll show you is how to find your apps
here on the home screen,
we can go down here to your apps and channels.
And if I click left,
I can see all so if I go through all this,
I've got to click through absolutely everything
it takes forever. So I can go all the way right
or just go click left and see all.
And here is kind of a grid layout of all the apps
on the Amazon Fire TV,
I can also do that
by holding that home button on the remote.
And it shows me that grid view for the apps.
So that's how I'm gonna be locating these.
If you want to download apps,
you're gonna come to the Apps tab up here on the top.
And you can scroll through these
you'll notice there is no search function here.
But what you can do is hold down your voice search,
search the Tubi TV app,
so yeah you can search it that way.
Click in here and then you can download an app this way.
So then it'll show up in your list of apps.
Now that we know how to download apps,
let's go back to that grid view
and get started on our top 10 apps.
The first one is YouTube.
Now you might be saying hang on that's obvious,
of course, YouTube, right?
Well, not necessarily because it was actually just,
I want to say yesterday or the day before,
as we were recording this,
that YouTube is finally made available
on the Amazon Fire again.
There was a big spat between Amazon and Google
and so they took their apps off of each other's platforms,
but now they've kissed and made up.
So now you can get the YouTube app on your Amazon Fire TV,
which is vital as far as I'm concerned.
This is obviously this is where you get me.
So it's the most important app on your TV.
Once you get in there, you can search everything,
just like you normally would on YouTube.
Alright, so now if we go back to our apps,
the next one is Express VPN,
this one is not an app that you're going
to find any content on.
But it's gonna be very important if you use other apps
to view content that depend on your location.
So for instance,
I do have one paid app on here called MLB.TV.
And with this one or other ones like it NBA TV, NHL TV,
what they do is you sign up for their service.
And it allows you to view all out of market games.
So in this case, all out of market baseball games.
And if I wanted to view my hometown team,
it's not gonna let me do that.
But with something like Express VPN,
it's going to mask your location
or you can change the location that you're streaming from
or that you're getting your data from.
So it can be very useful for privacy reasons
and for reasons of other apps.
So this one is pretty vital,
although you're not gonna find any content on it.
Next up is a few really well known ones Sony crackle
and Pluto TV, numbers three and four.
Sony crackle is an on-demand streaming service,
much like Netflix.
The difference here is that it's ad-supported.
And so it's free stuff.
So if I come in here to Sony crackle.
So now that I've opened it up,
I can log in if I wanna create an account
and kind of save all my stuff, or I can skip that
and just go right into browsing for stuff.
So as you can see, it's structured quite a bit like Netflix
with different genres that you can go through
and see movies.
So I mean, you can see some pretty great movies on here,
"Concussion", "Whiplash", that sort of thing.
But once you get in there and watch a show
it is going to be ad-supported.
So that's something to consider.
Next up Pluto TV is an ad-supported live TV network.
And so Pluto TV gives you over 100 channels
that you can browse through,
it's got a lot of great shows and movies.
This is where you're gonna find a lot of kind of,
I would call it B team content from Viacom channels.
So we're talking to MTV, BET that sort of thing.
Viacom actually purchased this.
That's why there's so much Viacom stuff on here.
But you can get movies, TV shows,
Stadium is a sports network
where you can check out some, you know,
off the beaten path stuff, but it's all free.
It's just ad-supported, much like Sony crackle.
Next up one of my favorites,
I found this one while I was searching around
for fun stuff to watch.
NASA has a streaming network
Who would have thought and quite frankly, it's brilliant.
If you're into NASA stuff, if you like space stuff,
then come in here and you can watch NASA live,
they've got latest images and videos that they've uploaded.
You can check out this content
where they will interview astronauts,
I was just watching a program
where they were interviewing the astronauts
on the space station so all of this stuff is on here.
And it is fantastic.
If this is the kind of content that you go for.
This app is wonderful.
Next up is another big surprise.
I discovered this one when I was looking
for apps for the Apple TV.
Luckily, it's available on the Fire TV as well.
Viki is Asian TV that is subtitled by fans
by you know mega fans, so they translate it
and subtitle it and put it on here for you to watch.
And so there are lots of great you know,
kind of comedies and dramas, action stuff,
really soapy Asian stuff, it's fantastic.
So if you're looking for something,
kind of off that beaten path, look up, Viki.
It's delightful.
Next up, Hoopla and Kanopy are kind of lumped
into the same category.
These are library based apps.
And what I mean by that is their public library apps,
you can go into Kanopy and log in
with your local library card.
And their most local libraries
are gonna be signed up either for Kanopy
or Hoopla mine is through Kanopy.
And so I can go in here
and watch some awesome movies, frankly,
they are really high quality stuff.
If you have a library card,
this is a no-brainer free content just based
on your library card.
Next up Ted, you're probably familiar with this.
But you may not know that they have an app
where they've gathered all of their content.
So you can go through based on topics or whatever
and check out TED Talks.
If you enjoy TED Talks, again, this is a no-brainer.
All right, and lastly, we have PBS and PBS Kids.
Now these ones are interesting
because they do have you log in via an interesting way.
If I go into PBS, it asks me to activate that.
So I'm gonna lean over to my laptop here
and activate it using the code that they give,
you guys can't see what I'm doing right now.
But once I get in there,
it asks me to verify that with the you know,
log in using Facebook or something like that.
But once you're in you get ton of PBS content,
the reason it has you log in
is because it's going to base it on your local PBS station.
And so if you have local stuff that you want to watch,
it's going to show up on this app.
Similarly, when you go into PBS Kids,
it'll have you do the same activation.
Obviously, if you have kids,
this is a must have,
my kids love "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood",
I can sing you all the songs all of them.
Now, these are apps that are all available
in the Amazon Fire TV app store.
So you can download them all directly.
Now there are a lot of other apps,
if you go search online for the best apps for Fire TV,
you're gonna find a lot of things like Cinema APK,
CyberFlix, Titanium TV,
these are apps that allow you to pull in content
that is of, (clears throat)
shall we say questionable legality.
And so I'm not gonna go through those apps,
but you can side load them.
That's one nice thing about the Amazon Fire TV
is that you can side load apps.
And I'll show you what I mean by that.
If you go up here to your settings, and over to My Fire TV,
then down here in Developer Options,
Apps from Unknown Sources,
it should come by default it says off.
But if you come in here and turn it on,
then this means that you can now download apps
from unknown sources.
And so if I go now and say, search for the downloader app,
there are a few apps like this one like Downloader
that will allow you to find apps
that aren't available on Amazon Fire's store.
And so you can get some things
that are of questionable legality, like I said,
and so we kind of steer away
from showing you everything about that.
But one thing that it does, that's really nice is gaming.
And so you can get NES and SNES emulators
and play them with Bluetooth controllers.
It's really great.
I'm just not gonna go through this
because those things aren't available
in the Amazon Fire TV app store.
So if you have any other questions about apps that we like,
or if you have any app recommendations,
hit the comments below and let us know
and let everybody else know as well.
We'll be up voting and hearting those comments
that have great content ideas.
So hit those comment and as a reminder,
don't forget that we are giving away
an Amazon Fire 55-inch Smart TV.
So hit the description, there's a link there
where you can see how to win that TV
that's going through July 26th.
And so if you're interested in that,
go check out that contest.
There are lots of ways to enter to win that
so thanks for watching guys.
I will see you on the next review.
(upbeat music)