Amazon Fire Stick question

[jpmarto]

I'm thinking about getting one.

1. If I use it on my home LAN, will it stream to/from Hopper layer 2/ethernet or will it rely on my ISP connection?
2. What WiFi speed would be the minimum to support it?
3. In your experience, will it functionally replace a Joey without too much of a learning curve?

Thanks!

 

[Tony S]

If you use it at home, it relies on the speed of your home network. It does not stream over the internet. If you are outside your home, it will rely on your ISP speed.

Outside your home, it is mostly your ISP upstream speed that matters the most. I used to have DSL and my upstream speed was only 0.7mbps, but I still used it, although the video was not that great. Now I have a cable modem and I get about 6mbps upstream, so the video looks really good. Inside you home, almost any home network will be fast enough for HD. Dish Anywhere maxes out at about 8.2mbps (which most home networks can handle easily). I don't know what the max is for the Fire Stick, but the Dish software will adapt use lower rates if your network can't handle the max speed.

I don't really own an Amazon fire stick, so I will leave your last question to other folks to answer. However, reviews that I have read have been positive.

 

[jpmarto]

Thanks Tony! I'm mostly concerned about inside the house, in case someone turns off Wifi on their phone and watches video over my limited Verizon plan. I've used Dish Anywhere on my smartphone and Amazon Fire, so I guess it could only be easier with the fire stick's remote control.

 

[Tony S]

Dish Anywhere does not stream over the internet when using your home network, so it will not eat up your monthly data allotment.

 

[dolfan3033]

I'm thinking about getting one.

1. If I use it on my home LAN, will it stream to/from Hopper layer 2/ethernet or will it rely on my ISP connection?
2. What WiFi speed would be the minimum to support it?
3. In your experience, will it functionally replace a Joey without too much of a learning curve?

Thanks!

It should stick to layer 2 as long as you’re on the same subnet. Not sure what the minimum speed is.. but I’m sure a LAN should support it. Remember, you can also get a OTG Micro USB power pass through connector and connect a USB Ethernet adapter to the fire stick and it’ll work using a wired connection vs relying on WiFi... even on the fire stick.

As far as performance, I use it on a fire tv box and a FireTV Stick. It works fine for what it is. It’s in my office.. which is a TV that’s not used too often. I wouldn’t use it on a tv that’s used often but it works fine. The only bottleneck is that there can only be one dish anywhere stream at a time. If your watching on a fireTV, you won’t be able to initiate another stream unless it bumps the first person off.. goes for live tv and DVR recordings. It does save 7/month, which is never a bad thing!

 

[eddie willers]

As far as performance, I use it on a fire tv box and a FireTV Stick. It works fine for what it is.

FWIW, it works better on my Fire Stick than on my Fire Tablet. Perfectly fine for as little use as it gets in my office. I use it for "live TV" instead of trying to pause FF etc. It doesn't quite do that as well.

 

[comfortably_numb]

I have a Fire Stick on my daughter’s TV since she isn’t home much. As the other posters have stated, it streams over your LAN so it doesn’t use any data. In our experience, it works great and does eliminate the $7 Joey fee.

 

[dolfan3033]

FWIW, it works better on my Fire Stick than on my Fire Tablet. Perfectly fine for as little use as it gets in my office. I use it for "live TV" instead of trying to pause FF etc. It doesn't quite do that as well.

Same here. Usually just tune to a channel and let it play as background noise.

 

[eddie willers]

Same here. Usually just tune to a channel and let it play as background noise.

And sports, which I ALWAYS do live (and the reason I haven't seen any commercials since whenever the first DISHPlayer 7100 came out)

 

[NYDutch]

We've tested using our FireTVstick and DishAnwhere app several times using a Verizon cell hotspot that's limited to 3G speeds where we usually see 2-3 Mbps down and 1-1.5 Mbps up with very little buffering and a decent picture. We normally use it with our AT&T 4G/LTE cell hotspot though, where 15-25 Mbps down and 7-10 Mbps up is more typical. The Hopper we stream from though, is Internet connected via Spectrum cable at 25-30 Mbps down and 4-5 Mbps up. All of our Internet services have unlimited data, so how much data the FireTVstick uses is not a concern for us.

 

[jpmarto]

Thanks for all the great information - I'm sure many others will find it useful. I just ordered a Fire Stick so I'm joining the club.

 

[TheKrell]

Thanks for all the great information - I'm sure many others will find it useful. I just ordered a Fire Stick so I'm joining the club.

Same here. The equivalent (?) Roku Streaming Stick costs more than twice that. I was most interested in the fact that it can stream from DishAnywhere. I bought a Zotac Zbox thinking I could do that. While the Zbox played back every HD file I could throw at it, and did so smoothly, it just could not handle that stream from my Sling Adapter.

 

[Sparky29]

I have the Firestick and am very happy with it. I feel it has enough features to reasonably replace the $7/mo joey. I use Dish Anywhere on my Android phone, Kindle and Windows computer also. The functionality of the Firestick (pause skip/fast forward and back) is better than on any of the other devices. Picture quality is at least as good. As with any Dish Anywhere devices, recordings from external drives are not available.

 

[MikeD-C05]

Love the Firestick and I have them on two different tvs that I rarely use. Saving the $14.00 a month in fees is a big savings to me. I only wish that DISH would allow more than one tuner to be used for streaming shows via the internet. I have 16 tuners on my hopper3, so I have plenty of tuners left over to accomplish that if they would allow it.

 

[TheKrell]

As with any Dish Anywhere devices, recordings from external drives are not available.

That's a function of your new fangled Hopper, not Dish Anywhere or these streamers.

 

[NYDutch]

I was just reading a post on another forum that referred to rain fade problems with sat TV. Another use we've made of our FireTVstick is when a major rain storm is getting close to our RV's location, we switch viewing to our FireStick with DishAnywhere streaming from our other Hopper at our upstate NY cottage. The only time that doesn't help avoid rain fade is when we're parked at the cottage sharing the same dish...

 

[david_jr]

Wow,, 1 stream is limiting. Imagine if Netflix did that?

 

[ncted]

Wow,, 1 stream is limiting. Imagine if Netflix did that?

Er..well, they do. The $7.99 plan only allows 1 screen at a time. Still, Netflix and Dish Anywhere are not really the same thing.

 

[charlesrshell]

Er..well, they do. The $7.99 plan only allows 1 screen at a time. Still, Netflix and Dish Anywhere are not really the same thing.

There is a fee to use Fire Stick?

 

[comfortably_numb]

There is a fee to use Fire Stick?

No. He’s talking about Netflix.