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OtinG · 07-12-2019, 06:07 PM

Quick Mini Review of the Fire TV Recast

Caveats: I’ve never owned or used an OTA DVR prior to the Fire TV Recast, so I have no past experience to compare it too. I have owned and/or used several Cable/Satellite DVRs in the past, and they mostly were marginal units provided by the Cable/Satellite TV service provider. The Fire TV Recast has a much better user experience than any of those I used in the past. Also note that I have not tested it with voice commands yet.

Overview

I must say I’m pleasantly surprised at how good of a device Amazon created in the Fire TV Recast. It is a DVR designed for OTA TV (broadcast TV received via an antenna) as well as being a media streamer capable of streaming OTA TV and a few compatible streaming services like Pluto TV to your Fire TVs and compatible mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). Note: It cannot record from any source other than an antenna—no recording from streaming, cable, or satellite services. I have no issue with the lack of recording ability from non-OTA live TV because I really don’t expect any OTA TV DVR will be able to allow that service due to legal and contractual agreements, unless jailbroken.

How Does It Work?

To view DVR recordings or live OTA TV (and compatible services like Pluto TV), you must have a Fire TV or a compatible mobile device with the Fire TV app installed. I have not found a way to view recordings or live TV via a computer because Amazon has not released a Fire TV app for Mac. I’m not sure about Windows PC. Although you can view Prime Video in a browser on a computer, there does not seem to be a way to view the Fire TV Recast’s recordings or live TV streams in a browser.

Once you run through the rather easy and painless setup with your Fire TV Recast, the Menu at the top of the Fire TV Home screen will display a new DVR menu item. See image below where I circled the new DVR menu item. Selecting the DVR menu item will display the Fire TV Recast home screen on your Fire TV.

I forgot to look at the Fire TV iOS app prior to setup, but after the Fire TV Recast is set up the app Home screen displays the On Now page containing the live OTA TV programming you have available to watch at that time. See the left screen capture below. You have a menu across the bottom of the screen to toggle between On Now, Recordings (see right screen capture below), Remote, and Settings. Basically the mobile app is a scaled down version of what you get via a Fire TV. I’ll discuss that below (assuming I remember).

My Ratings

I think I need to separate out my ratings into three categories. First, the Fire TV Recast device itself. Second, the User Experience (UX) and UI when using the Fire TV Recast with a Fire TV. Third, the User Experience (UX) and UI when using the Fire TV Recast with a compatible mobile device via the Fire TV mobile app.

Fire TV Recast: Rating

So far I have to give this DVR and streaming box a very high rating. I’ll give it 4.5 stars. I’m perfectly fine with being limited to the Amazon “walled garden” when it comes to using the Fire TV Recast. Some will not like that, and I totally understand. With devices like TiVo and Tablo you can enjoy them via Fire TVs, Rokus, and other streaming devices. That will be a BIG plus for many people. But for me I don’t need that. And of course YMMV and your needs might be totally different from mine.

I do own two Rokus, but I prefer to use my Fire TVs. One reason is because with my Fire TVs in conjunction with the Fire TV Recast, I can have direct access to streaming services like Hulu with Live TV and Netflix, plus I can easily stream Prime Video, and now I can stream OTA live TV and Pluto TV, and all of this is rather seamless. In the past, to watch live OTA TV I had to take out a universal remote, press a button to switch control to my sound-base then toggle through the HTML ports to the one attached to my TV, then press another button to switch control to my TV then toggle through the input devices to actually watch OTA TV. All of that basically set up my system to watch OTA TV on my TV with sound output to my sound-base. It worked well, but it was kind of a pain to have to go through that ritual. Once the TV and sound-base were able to allow me to enjoy OTA TV I had to use the TV’s guide, which to put it mildly, blew big chunks. I have a 10 year old Sony Brava TV, it is really nice, but was made before smart TVs were popular, and lacks many currently available features. The channel guide it uses often is incorrect, is a PITA to make work, and is very clunky to use. In a brief statement, viewing OTA TV in this manner made for a frustrating user experience mostly because the UI was dated and not very easy to navigate. Now once I was finished watching OTA TV and wanted to go watch Hulu with Live TV or some other programming on my Fire TV or Roku, I would then have to use the universal remote and toggle through the input devices on my TV to return to using my sound-base to control the home theater stuff, then toggle through the HTML ports on the sound-base to the one attached to my Fire TV (or Roku or whatever device I wanted to switch to).

So as you can see, switching over to watch live OTA TV on my TV was a chore, to say the least. I have two TVs, one in the living room and one in my study. Both required a similar ritual to switch between OTA TV and streaming services. The one in my study doesn’t use a sound-base though as it is a newer Vizio smart TV, but it still was a chore to switch services. I mostly use the TV in the living room though, and that was the one I described the process for above.

Okay that was a long winded explanation of why I don’t mind using the Fire TV Recast and being tied to the Amazon “walled garden”. With the Fire TV Recast in conjunction with my Fire TVs, I can use one remote, press one button that turns on the TV and the sound-base and the Fire TV, and sets the sound-base to the proper HML port so that I will see the Fire TV Home page after all the devices turn on. One button, imagine that! Also one button turns it all off too. I’m not sure if I could do that with a Tablo, TiVo, etc., but I knew I could with the Fire TV Recast, which made it the one to choose.

As stated above, I give the Fire TV Recast box a 4.5 star rating. It was crazy easy to set up. I set it up and had it working in less than 30 minutes with no issues at all. Amazon did a very good job of making the setup run smoothly. The user experience was extremely good, and the UI used in the mobile Fire TV app to setup the Fire TV Recast was intuitive and easy to use. Amazon has not always been known for easy, intuitive setups but they nailed it this time.

The hardware seems more than adequate for what the Fire TV Recast was designed to do. It is very quite running. It was easy to connect all the cables and what not. It has Gigabit Ethernet. The only reason I’m dinging it by half a star is because of the slightly lower resolution it uses. Lower than some other DVRs from what I understand, but I’m not that familiar with any of the other devices. Amazon opted to transcode all of the recordings and streams into 720p with 60 frames per second. Honestly, it looks pretty good, but if you compare it to the live TV channels that are received in 1080i, then it has a bit less quality than they have. However, the constant 720p at 60 frames per second means all channels look and function pretty much alike. The Fire TV Recast actually saves the recording in MPEG2 in the original format in which they are received, but it transcodes them in real time when streaming. I know of no easy way to get at those original format files though, but if they ever offer access to them or if they ever decide to offer 1080i streaming, then the rating would jump up to 5 stars IMO.

BTW, Amazon nows allows us to plug in an external HDD or SSD for extra storage space. But they do make you reformat the drive so they can lock down the recordings.

Streaming OTA TV and Pluto TV to Fire TVs: Rating

I give this aspect of the user experience at least a 4 star rating and probably a 4.5 star rating. The afore-mentioned lack of 1080i streaming does lower the quality of streaming on certain channels. But I don’t see any issues with action scenes, so that is one reason Amazon decided on 60 frames per second at 720p. The quality of the streaming is at least as good as most of the cable TV services I’ve used in the past. If you compare it to them then it looks really good. If you compare it to Prime Video or Hulu on the Fire TV, then Prime Video and Hulu have that competition won due to higher resolution. One reason I read that Amazon chose 720p at 60 fps was to keep the bandwidth down enough to allow two consecutive streams as well as two consecutive recordings simultaneously. I have 200 Mbps internet, so with the Gigabit Ethernet I don’t anticipate any streaming issues, nor have I encountered any. As mentioned earlier, I have no experience with other DVRs like Tablo or TiVo, so I cannot make a comparison to them. I can tell you it is at least as good as the cable TV DVRs I used in the past when it comes to resolution.

The Channel Guide

The user experience with the UI in general, and especially with the Channel Guide, is very good. The Channel Guide was well designed, gives me plenty of information, and is customizable to a certain degree. See image below. As you can see from the image, the Channel Guide lists the OTA channels that my antenna was able to find during scanning. It also lists the Pluto TV channels. So it is very convenient to have both of these in one guide. If I click on an OTA TV channel or a Pluto TV channel, I’m taken to that channel in a fairly seamless fashion. I’m sure the Pluto TV channels are using the Pluto TV app, but it is very seamless, and when I am watching a Pluto TV channel I can jump back to the guide. You really don’t get the feeling you are in the Pluto TV app because it is that seamless. to be clear again, you cannot record the Pluto TV channels. You can only record OTA TV channels. I have a total of 196 TV channels when you combine the 75 OTA TV channels that were located during scan and the 121 Pluto TV channels that are provided through that service. However, most of those are not something I want to watch. There are a lot of foreign language channels and channels of no interest to me. However, the Fire TVs allow you to hide or show the channels you want to have appear in the guide. This is a great feature as I wound up only being interested in 31 OTA channels and 47 of the Pluto TV channels. To show or hide or make a channel a favorite, simply go to the Fire TV Home page and select Settings —> Live TV —> Channel Management —> Fire TV Recast (or Pluto TV, then go through the list of all the channels and toggle them to your preference. Hidden channels will not be displayed in the Channel Guide.

On Now

An alternative to the Channel Guide is the On Now list of programs currently being broadcast. To access this list, select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down and to the On Now row.

Recording

Setting a recording via the Channel Guide on a Fire TV is pretty easy and flexible. Simply select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down and select Channel Guide, locate the program you want to record, click the Menu button on the Fire TV remote, and select Record. You can select one episode only or the entire series. I think it can be done by voice command too, but I have not yet attempted any voice commands. There are several Default Recording Options you can set up. To set up these options, go to the Fire TV Home page and select Settings —> Live TV —> Live TV Sources —> Fire TV Recast —> Default Recording Options to set the following options:

Start Recording (can set to On Time, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes earlier, 1 hour earlier)
Stop Recording (can set to On Time, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes longer, 1 hour longer)
Keep At Most (can set to 5, 15, or 20 episodes)
Recording Preference (can set to New Episodes or All Episodes)
Image Quality (can set to HD Preferred, HD Only, SD Preferred, SD Only, or Any)

This is a decent amount of control over recording settings, certainly more than I had with Spectrum cable TV or have with Hulu Live TV, but it could be a bit more robust IMO. I would also like to be able to set a time from and time to option, and I would like to have a way to lock a specific program to a specific channel. For example, if I set This Old House to record every episode in the series on PBS, I will get all the episodes shown on other channels recorded too, and I might not want that to happen. PBS has a couple of side channels including Create on which they rebroadcast already shown episodes of their more popular shows, so I could wind up with more episodes than I want or need. Thankfully you can set the maximum number as shown above, but being able to tie the program to a single channel would be a great filter to have.

To review your list of scheduled recordings, select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down and select Scheduled Recordings.

To review your recorded programs select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down to the My Recordings row.

Streaming OTA TV and Pluto TV to the Mobile Fire TV App: Rating

I give this aspect of the user experience a 3 star to 3.5 star rating. In the mobile app you don’t notice the slightly lower resolution of 720p, especially on a smartphone. However, the mobile app is a greatly scaled down version of what we have on the Fire TVs. The most notable omission, and it is a huge omission, is the Channel Guide. Rather than have a Channel Guide, you only have the On Now list which takes a while to scroll through. The second major omission is the lack of ability to hide unwanted channels. I have 196 channels in total but only show 78 of them on the Fire TVs, but I have to scroll through all 196 on the mobile Fire TV app. Amazon dropped the ball here and made the user experience less appealing than it has on the Fire TVs. It means you can only schedule recordings from currently playing programs. Without the Channel Guide there is no way to search for future programming they way you can on the Fire TV. That is a major hit to user experience, enough to drop the rating significantly for the mobile app.

The mobile Fire TV app does allow you to stream outside of your local WiFi network though, so you can stream live OTA TV and recorded programs if you set it to allow streaming out of home, in other words, allow a cellular connection. To allow this, select Settings —> Data Usage and toggle on the option. You have multiple options as far as streaming quality from which to choose.

The rest of the functionality in the mobile app is on par with the Fire TVs, but this was clearly designed for mobile use. If you want to set up options for the Fire TV Recast I suggest doing that with a Fire TV.

Conclusion

I paid just $130 plus tax on sale for the Fire TV Recast. At that price it is a winner. For my particular case and usage criteria, I think it was a great choice and so far I am very happy with it. But I’ve only had a short time to use it so far—about 24 hours. Time will tell. Over all I’ve had a very good user experience and the UI is certainly well done. I’m still amazed and pleasantly surprised that Amazon was able to get it this close to greatness. The 720p is pretty good. Action and sports scenes and darker scenes suffer a little bit. OTA directly to TV from antenna is generally better, but not that much. There are a lot of OTA TV channels that are broadcast in SD still, so the lower resolution really doesn’t have a big of an impact as one might imagine. Actually, very few of my OTA channels are broadcast in HD. I will post my experiences when I get around to testing it with voice commands. I’m not holding my breath on that though.

07-12-2019, 06:07 PM	#3765
OtinG Old Gadget Guy Posts: 1,913 Karma: 6854865 Join Date: Jun 2018 Device: Oasis 3, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad mini 6, iPad Air 2020, Alexa Devices	Quick Mini Review of the Fire TV Recast Quick Mini Review of the Fire TV Recast Caveats: I’ve never owned or used an OTA DVR prior to the Fire TV Recast, so I have no past experience to compare it too. I have owned and/or used several Cable/Satellite DVRs in the past, and they mostly were marginal units provided by the Cable/Satellite TV service provider. The Fire TV Recast has a much better user experience than any of those I used in the past. Also note that I have not tested it with voice commands yet. Overview I must say I’m pleasantly surprised at how good of a device Amazon created in the Fire TV Recast. It is a DVR designed for OTA TV (broadcast TV received via an antenna) as well as being a media streamer capable of streaming OTA TV and a few compatible streaming services like Pluto TV to your Fire TVs and compatible mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). Note: It cannot record from any source other than an antenna—no recording from streaming, cable, or satellite services. I have no issue with the lack of recording ability from non-OTA live TV because I really don’t expect any OTA TV DVR will be able to allow that service due to legal and contractual agreements, unless jailbroken. How Does It Work? To view DVR recordings or live OTA TV (and compatible services like Pluto TV), you must have a Fire TV or a compatible mobile device with the Fire TV app installed. I have not found a way to view recordings or live TV via a computer because Amazon has not released a Fire TV app for Mac. I’m not sure about Windows PC. Although you can view Prime Video in a browser on a computer, there does not seem to be a way to view the Fire TV Recast’s recordings or live TV streams in a browser. Once you run through the rather easy and painless setup with your Fire TV Recast, the Menu at the top of the Fire TV Home screen will display a new DVR menu item. See image below where I circled the new DVR menu item. Selecting the DVR menu item will display the Fire TV Recast home screen on your Fire TV. I forgot to look at the Fire TV iOS app prior to setup, but after the Fire TV Recast is set up the app Home screen displays the On Now page containing the live OTA TV programming you have available to watch at that time. See the left screen capture below. You have a menu across the bottom of the screen to toggle between On Now, Recordings (see right screen capture below), Remote, and Settings. Basically the mobile app is a scaled down version of what you get via a Fire TV. I’ll discuss that below (assuming I remember). My Ratings I think I need to separate out my ratings into three categories. First, the Fire TV Recast device itself. Second, the User Experience (UX) and UI when using the Fire TV Recast with a Fire TV. Third, the User Experience (UX) and UI when using the Fire TV Recast with a compatible mobile device via the Fire TV mobile app. Fire TV Recast: Rating So far I have to give this DVR and streaming box a very high rating. I’ll give it 4.5 stars. I’m perfectly fine with being limited to the Amazon “walled garden” when it comes to using the Fire TV Recast. Some will not like that, and I totally understand. With devices like TiVo and Tablo you can enjoy them via Fire TVs, Rokus, and other streaming devices. That will be a BIG plus for many people. But for me I don’t need that. And of course YMMV and your needs might be totally different from mine. I do own two Rokus, but I prefer to use my Fire TVs. One reason is because with my Fire TVs in conjunction with the Fire TV Recast, I can have direct access to streaming services like Hulu with Live TV and Netflix, plus I can easily stream Prime Video, and now I can stream OTA live TV and Pluto TV, and all of this is rather seamless. In the past, to watch live OTA TV I had to take out a universal remote, press a button to switch control to my sound-base then toggle through the HTML ports to the one attached to my TV, then press another button to switch control to my TV then toggle through the input devices to actually watch OTA TV. All of that basically set up my system to watch OTA TV on my TV with sound output to my sound-base. It worked well, but it was kind of a pain to have to go through that ritual. Once the TV and sound-base were able to allow me to enjoy OTA TV I had to use the TV’s guide, which to put it mildly, blew big chunks. I have a 10 year old Sony Brava TV, it is really nice, but was made before smart TVs were popular, and lacks many currently available features. The channel guide it uses often is incorrect, is a PITA to make work, and is very clunky to use. In a brief statement, viewing OTA TV in this manner made for a frustrating user experience mostly because the UI was dated and not very easy to navigate. Now once I was finished watching OTA TV and wanted to go watch Hulu with Live TV or some other programming on my Fire TV or Roku, I would then have to use the universal remote and toggle through the input devices on my TV to return to using my sound-base to control the home theater stuff, then toggle through the HTML ports on the sound-base to the one attached to my Fire TV (or Roku or whatever device I wanted to switch to). So as you can see, switching over to watch live OTA TV on my TV was a chore, to say the least. I have two TVs, one in the living room and one in my study. Both required a similar ritual to switch between OTA TV and streaming services. The one in my study doesn’t use a sound-base though as it is a newer Vizio smart TV, but it still was a chore to switch services. I mostly use the TV in the living room though, and that was the one I described the process for above. Okay that was a long winded explanation of why I don’t mind using the Fire TV Recast and being tied to the Amazon “walled garden”. With the Fire TV Recast in conjunction with my Fire TVs, I can use one remote, press one button that turns on the TV and the sound-base and the Fire TV, and sets the sound-base to the proper HML port so that I will see the Fire TV Home page after all the devices turn on. One button, imagine that! Also one button turns it all off too. I’m not sure if I could do that with a Tablo, TiVo, etc., but I knew I could with the Fire TV Recast, which made it the one to choose. As stated above, I give the Fire TV Recast box a 4.5 star rating. It was crazy easy to set up. I set it up and had it working in less than 30 minutes with no issues at all. Amazon did a very good job of making the setup run smoothly. The user experience was extremely good, and the UI used in the mobile Fire TV app to setup the Fire TV Recast was intuitive and easy to use. Amazon has not always been known for easy, intuitive setups but they nailed it this time. The hardware seems more than adequate for what the Fire TV Recast was designed to do. It is very quite running. It was easy to connect all the cables and what not. It has Gigabit Ethernet. The only reason I’m dinging it by half a star is because of the slightly lower resolution it uses. Lower than some other DVRs from what I understand, but I’m not that familiar with any of the other devices. Amazon opted to transcode all of the recordings and streams into 720p with 60 frames per second. Honestly, it looks pretty good, but if you compare it to the live TV channels that are received in 1080i, then it has a bit less quality than they have. However, the constant 720p at 60 frames per second means all channels look and function pretty much alike. The Fire TV Recast actually saves the recording in MPEG2 in the original format in which they are received, but it transcodes them in real time when streaming. I know of no easy way to get at those original format files though, but if they ever offer access to them or if they ever decide to offer 1080i streaming, then the rating would jump up to 5 stars IMO. BTW, Amazon nows allows us to plug in an external HDD or SSD for extra storage space. But they do make you reformat the drive so they can lock down the recordings. Streaming OTA TV and Pluto TV to Fire TVs: Rating I give this aspect of the user experience at least a 4 star rating and probably a 4.5 star rating. The afore-mentioned lack of 1080i streaming does lower the quality of streaming on certain channels. But I don’t see any issues with action scenes, so that is one reason Amazon decided on 60 frames per second at 720p. The quality of the streaming is at least as good as most of the cable TV services I’ve used in the past. If you compare it to them then it looks really good. If you compare it to Prime Video or Hulu on the Fire TV, then Prime Video and Hulu have that competition won due to higher resolution. One reason I read that Amazon chose 720p at 60 fps was to keep the bandwidth down enough to allow two consecutive streams as well as two consecutive recordings simultaneously. I have 200 Mbps internet, so with the Gigabit Ethernet I don’t anticipate any streaming issues, nor have I encountered any. As mentioned earlier, I have no experience with other DVRs like Tablo or TiVo, so I cannot make a comparison to them. I can tell you it is at least as good as the cable TV DVRs I used in the past when it comes to resolution. The Channel Guide The user experience with the UI in general, and especially with the Channel Guide, is very good. The Channel Guide was well designed, gives me plenty of information, and is customizable to a certain degree. See image below. As you can see from the image, the Channel Guide lists the OTA channels that my antenna was able to find during scanning. It also lists the Pluto TV channels. So it is very convenient to have both of these in one guide. If I click on an OTA TV channel or a Pluto TV channel, I’m taken to that channel in a fairly seamless fashion. I’m sure the Pluto TV channels are using the Pluto TV app, but it is very seamless, and when I am watching a Pluto TV channel I can jump back to the guide. You really don’t get the feeling you are in the Pluto TV app because it is that seamless. to be clear again, you cannot record the Pluto TV channels. You can only record OTA TV channels. I have a total of 196 TV channels when you combine the 75 OTA TV channels that were located during scan and the 121 Pluto TV channels that are provided through that service. However, most of those are not something I want to watch. There are a lot of foreign language channels and channels of no interest to me. However, the Fire TVs allow you to hide or show the channels you want to have appear in the guide. This is a great feature as I wound up only being interested in 31 OTA channels and 47 of the Pluto TV channels. To show or hide or make a channel a favorite, simply go to the Fire TV Home page and select Settings —> Live TV —> Channel Management —> Fire TV Recast (or Pluto TV, then go through the list of all the channels and toggle them to your preference. Hidden channels will not be displayed in the Channel Guide. On Now An alternative to the Channel Guide is the On Now list of programs currently being broadcast. To access this list, select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down and to the On Now row. Recording Setting a recording via the Channel Guide on a Fire TV is pretty easy and flexible. Simply select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down and select Channel Guide, locate the program you want to record, click the Menu button on the Fire TV remote, and select Record. You can select one episode only or the entire series. I think it can be done by voice command too, but I have not yet attempted any voice commands. There are several Default Recording Options you can set up. To set up these options, go to the Fire TV Home page and select Settings —> Live TV —> Live TV Sources —> Fire TV Recast —> Default Recording Options to set the following options: Start Recording (can set to On Time, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes earlier, 1 hour earlier) Stop Recording (can set to On Time, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes longer, 1 hour longer) Keep At Most (can set to 5, 15, or 20 episodes) Recording Preference (can set to New Episodes or All Episodes) Image Quality (can set to HD Preferred, HD Only, SD Preferred, SD Only, or Any) This is a decent amount of control over recording settings, certainly more than I had with Spectrum cable TV or have with Hulu Live TV, but it could be a bit more robust IMO. I would also like to be able to set a time from and time to option, and I would like to have a way to lock a specific program to a specific channel. For example, if I set This Old House to record every episode in the series on PBS, I will get all the episodes shown on other channels recorded too, and I might not want that to happen. PBS has a couple of side channels including Create on which they rebroadcast already shown episodes of their more popular shows, so I could wind up with more episodes than I want or need. Thankfully you can set the maximum number as shown above, but being able to tie the program to a single channel would be a great filter to have. To review your list of scheduled recordings, select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down and select Scheduled Recordings. To review your recorded programs select the DVR menu item on the Fire TV Home page, scroll down to the My Recordings row. Streaming OTA TV and Pluto TV to the Mobile Fire TV App: Rating I give this aspect of the user experience a 3 star to 3.5 star rating. In the mobile app you don’t notice the slightly lower resolution of 720p, especially on a smartphone. However, the mobile app is a greatly scaled down version of what we have on the Fire TVs. The most notable omission, and it is a huge omission, is the Channel Guide. Rather than have a Channel Guide, you only have the On Now list which takes a while to scroll through. The second major omission is the lack of ability to hide unwanted channels. I have 196 channels in total but only show 78 of them on the Fire TVs, but I have to scroll through all 196 on the mobile Fire TV app. Amazon dropped the ball here and made the user experience less appealing than it has on the Fire TVs. It means you can only schedule recordings from currently playing programs. Without the Channel Guide there is no way to search for future programming they way you can on the Fire TV. That is a major hit to user experience, enough to drop the rating significantly for the mobile app. The mobile Fire TV app does allow you to stream outside of your local WiFi network though, so you can stream live OTA TV and recorded programs if you set it to allow streaming out of home, in other words, allow a cellular connection. To allow this, select Settings —> Data Usage and toggle on the option. You have multiple options as far as streaming quality from which to choose. The rest of the functionality in the mobile app is on par with the Fire TVs, but this was clearly designed for mobile use. If you want to set up options for the Fire TV Recast I suggest doing that with a Fire TV. Conclusion I paid just $130 plus tax on sale for the Fire TV Recast. At that price it is a winner. For my particular case and usage criteria, I think it was a great choice and so far I am very happy with it. But I’ve only had a short time to use it so far—about 24 hours. Time will tell. Over all I’ve had a very good user experience and the UI is certainly well done. I’m still amazed and pleasantly surprised that Amazon was able to get it this close to greatness. The 720p is pretty good. Action and sports scenes and darker scenes suffer a little bit. OTA directly to TV from antenna is generally better, but not that much. There are a lot of OTA TV channels that are broadcast in SD still, so the lower resolution really doesn’t have a big of an impact as one might imagine. Actually, very few of my OTA channels are broadcast in HD. I will post my experiences when I get around to testing it with voice commands. I’m not holding my breath on that though. Last edited by OtinG; 07-12-2019 at 11:41 PM.