This history on viewing video was a result of being asked to review a Google Fire device and compare it to the Apple TV device. As you might guess from the picture I will get to a review of the Fire Cube and Apple TV but it is at the end of the article. If you are looking for a very technical review this won’t be it. However, if you are looking for a review by someone who uses both and has no iron in the fire, this might be it. We have both hooked up to our LG television and we regularly switch back and forth.
I have been watching television since I was seven or eight years old. I feel fortunate that television could not compete with the outdoors when I was growing up and my high school years were nearly devoid of television. I went to a military boarding school starting in the fall of 1963. Our television was limited to fifteen minutes after study hall in the evenings. I never got hooked. We did end up with three children born while we were living on the farm and they were fond of Sesame Street among other shows. Television there was limited to two channels which we picked up with an antennae. It sort of matched the newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, that we received in the mail the day after it was printed. We listened to a lot of CBC radio.
In the snowy winter of 1984, we had enough cash to splurge on a Panasonic VCR. Even though the Betamax – VHS war had yet to be settled, I bet on VHS. After all I was in the technology world selling Apple computers. We paid just over $700 Canadian for the VCR. It was easy enough for me to pick up some movies on the way home and bring them back in a day or two.
Five years later after we have lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Columbia, Maryland, we moved to the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Virginia. There we had easy access to a Blockbuster Video store among others.
By the mid-nineties changes were afoot, as DVDs took over from VCRs rather quickly. The only reason to keep your VCR was for dance recital tapes. Recordable one session DVDs were incredibly expensive when they first came out sometimes costing over $20 each but they easily beat the LaserDisk competition. By the end of the decade (1999) Apple had iMovie software out for creating great personal movies. By early 2001 Apple released iDVD for authoring DVRs using movies created in iMovie. It had limitations but it was a great tool and I made a number of DVDs until the product was discontinued in 2011.
When we moved into our new house at the coast in 2006, it was the peak of the tower babel for video. We had a Sony-DVD-CD player and a Sony VCR hooked to a whole house system of speakers in each room. Each room had port where you could plug an iPod. We might have used one of the original iPods that I won at Apple on the system once or twice but that was it. The times were a changing. Our system was probably out of date before we finished paying for it. As people started streaming media on the Internet, interest in DVDs and even creating them dwindled. Sometime in late 2010, Apple introduced the last iDVD software with its iLife series. Steve Jobs had lost interest in it so iDVD was part of iLife but not promoted.
Not long after that we got our first Roku and started experimenting with streaming alongside our cable Television. Prime Video came along in 2011 but the first series to really get us to bite on streaming was Netflix’s House of Cards in early 2013.
In 2018, we did a refresh of our household video equipment. The driving force was our twelve-year-old cable box needed almost daily rebooting, We took the opportunity to send the dead Sony CD-ROM/DVD player and dead Sony VCR to electronics recycling, We added a Sony streaming box with a Blu-ray Disk player. I also rewired everything so I could get rid of the extra HDMI cables that showed on the mantel. It made my wife very happy. By rewiring and adding an HDMI switch I could add a Chromecast to our Roku and Sony box. The biggest challenge was getting our new cable modem to work. It was quite the saga We also took the opportunity to add a streaming only television to a newly constructed upstairs room
I just checked Amazon. After the installation of the new BlueRay DVD player, I bought exactly one BlueRay movie, Second Hand Lions.
While this was all going on, I started making YouTube videos. I made my first ones in 2009. While I haven’t uploaded a new one since 2020, I have 153 videos that I made on my YouTube Channel. I started doing videos on Google Photos eleven years ago in 2013.
In 2021 when we moved to North Carolina’s Piedmont, we signed up for a fiber connection with the local telephone Coop. While I work for a company that builds fiber networks, we don’t have one in North Carolina. We never even hooked up the available cable outside our house. A year after moving here, I was comfortable enough to write an article, How to be a sensible streamer.
So here we are forty years after buying that first VCR. We are on our second Fire Cube. After two years the first one got cranky as electronic sometimes will do. We bought a new one in February 2023 and it has been great. Our company is considering a promo where we give away an Apple TV streaming box with new signups. I offered to buy and test The Apple TV since I have more experience streaming with fiber than anyone else in the office.
First off they both boxes offer all the bells and whistles that you need to get high quality streaming. Their user interfaces and how some things work are the main differences,
It you are used to the Apple ecosystem and have either an iPad, iPhone or a Mac, you will likely be very comfortable with the Apple TV. The controller which has a tiny touchpad takes some time to get used to using but it is something most people master in a few minutes. As a bonus Siri is really good at turning on closed captions and finding apps. The Apple TV user interface is more pleasing that Amazon’s. Amazon uses its interface to try to get you to buy content. I don’t get the feeling that Apple is pushing me to buy a particular show. I also like how Apple TV keeps track of what I have been watching even if I was watching Britbox on FireTV. Every app, Britbox, Acorn, Disney, Prime Video, or Netflix looks better and more consistent on Apple TV.
If you are not an Apple user, the authentication required to download an app might be something new to you. When you install a new app on your Apple TV, you will be asked to authenticate with your Apple ID password (it is easy to create if you don’t have one). Because I had an iPad in the room with the Apple TV, it sent a notice to the iPad which verified who I was with facial recognition. I still had to confirm the download by doing a double click on an iPad button. Then and only then can you sign into the service.
Fire TV does not ask for the authentication before downloading, you move directly to entering you password for the service.
The only quirks we have noticed are the FireTV regularly hangs on trying to load Britbox. On the Apple TV side, we have been unable to find our local news to stream. Currently we just switch over to FireTV and for some reason local live TV is available there.
One question which might come up. We have our Apple TV hooked up with Ethernet but we are using WiFi for the FireTV Cube. First the television is hooked up by Ethernet. Second the Fire Cube has a limited Ethernet connection which is slower than wireless. The Apple TV has a 1 Gb Ethernet port. From what I have been able to learn that makes no difference. Most reports state that streaming only requires 100 Mbps.
Our technological infirmity 