My Biggest Issue with the New Amazon Fire TV Stick

1 points by bg0 9y ago ↗ HN

My roommate has the old Amazon Fire TV Stick (the one without Alexa built into the remote) and loves it so I thought I'd get the new one with Alexa for my dad to replace his chromecast; since it would allow him to watch everything available to him on Amazon Prime as well as all the premium channels he has subscribed to via cable.

Little did I know, he now needs both the chromecast and the Amazon stick to watch all of his favorite shows and movies.

The Old Firestick: Give's you have access to Amazon Prime, HBO, Showtime, Starz, Netflix, etc all from the downloadable apps.

The New Firestick: They disabled the Starz App.

Amazon recently came out with a way to Subscribe to Starz and Cinemax as an al le cart model with an Amazon Prime subscription. Now, on the new fire tv stick, they only let you subscribe through them at an additional cost and does not allow you to connect through your account through an existing cable provider.

The only thing the Fire TV Stick, in my eyes, had over the Roku, Apple TV, or the Chromecast is access to Amazon Prime video. Now, Amazon is making you pay even more money to access Starz. I understand that the reason they did this was to start integrating Starz into the Alexa search, but it literally defeats the entire purpose of switching over to the new Fire TV Stick (if you could do without Alexa).

I ended up returning the new fire stick and getting the old one so we could have access to everything inside one piece of hardware.

Anyone have any opinions on this or am I just being salty?