Pretty much every video app supports Chromecast.
Except that Amazon just pulled Twitch off of the Roku store…
Hey, the long rumored then confirmed but no one knew when Amazon App is finally available for the Apple TV!
Amazon is pulling Twitch from everywhere except Fire devices though.
*So, I guess if you love Twitch that much then you have to get a Fire? For me, it’s another reason to avoid the Fire… exclusivity bullshit.
Seriously? That’s a shitty move. Guess I can ditch my Roku for real now. That’s the only reason I was holding on to it, as there’s no Twitch on LG TVs. I’ll just use the Steam Link to mirror my PC.
Whaaaaat? How did I miss that. I haven’t checked it lately, so this new for me.
I sent you registered mail, you know you got it, you signed for it. Don’t lie, liar.
While par for the course, this battle sucks for consumers, as there’s no one cheap plug and play device that offers everything.
I’ve got the 2017 Shield and it’s been great but pricey. I also use it to stream games from my PC with the bundled gamepad (works with Origin as well, not just Steam - as long as you run Nvidia, albeit can be more fiddly than Steam link). I can see Amazon wanting to pull the Amazon video app and Twitch if this battle progresses. However pulling Twitch and Amazon video from Android (which the Shield runs) would seem to be a bad move as Amazon is still a content distributor first and foremost.
Wait. Wait… can you twitch and youtube off an Apple? APPLE is going to be the most open of the closed gardens? WTF.
The ShieldTV still supports google play, amazon, netflix, twitch, and youtube.
AppleTV is the same except iTunes replaces google play.
Roku supports everything except iTunes and now, Twitch. People are running a Plex Twitch channel for that, but the APIs are still available so there’s no reason they couldn’t make a Roku Twitch channel again.
Note there’s a deal right now where you prepay for 4 months of DirecTV Now for $140 and get a 32GB AppleTV 4k. It’s a spectacular deal if you want/need one. DirecTV Now itself is stinking rotten diaper garbage because it doesn’t have a DVR, but the normal price for a 32GB ATV4k is $180 so it’s $40 off the top and who cares that DTV Now sucks.
I was considering that ATV4k deal myself to replace the FTV2 in my bedroom. But honestly, I would be downright astonished if some bright boy on XDA didn’t release a YouTube webview app for the FTV in short order. And actually, I would be surprised if Amazon doesn’t give in to Google because people will drop their FTVs in droves if they lose YouTube on the appstore.
The 4K Apple TV only has a few deficiencies at this point:
- No Dolby Atmos. Apple has promised a future tvOS update will include it.
- YouTube app doesn’t stream 4K content.
- No official Twitch app. A 3rd party app, Twitchy, is pretty good, or you can use AirPlay.
Also, the Vudu app doesn’t seem to support 4K, but I use Movies Anywhere to watch them on iTunes in 4K HDR. With Mad Max Fury Road, the Black & Chrome edition was included for no extra charge, which was pretty sweet.
- It’s expensive!
- The remote is silly!
That said, it’s still my pick.
It’s very expensive compared to everything other than the shieldTV even with that deal, and the remote is an abomination unto god. If I were to go with that DTVNow deal, I would use my Harmony remote.
I’m used to the remote by now, to the point where using a remote without a trackpad feels wrong. I love being able to scrub the timeline on videos and tapping the edges to go forward/back 10 secs.
I did enclose it in a rubberized case I bought off Amazon, to give it some thickness.
I’ve been a big Chromecast fan for the last two or three years; I love how it simply allows me to cast so many apps directly to my TVs (actually, I have it connected to my AVR which is connected to my TV.) But it bugged me that I couldn’t get Amazon Prime videos even though I’ve been an Amazon Prime member for years.
So I decided to try a Roku, and I had a coupon deal that let me get a Roku Ultra at a good price. And I’ve got to say I REALLY like it. Plex, Netflix, Hulu, all seem to run faster and with less buffering than my Chromecast 2 (which wasn’t bad at all.) And I love tinkering around finding new “channels.”
Due to the pissing match between Google and Amazon, I’m happy to move to a non-Google/non-Amazon item. Also makes me feel even better about moving from Chrome to the new Firefox Quantum. I’ll replace my other two Chromecasts with a Roku.
The Twitch app on Roku was awful. There was no way to load your own subscriptions. You had to browse by game and nothing else. Hopefully they pulled it because it was trash and they’re going to launch one that is actually worthwhile.
I’m in the beta for this!
Yeah, but I hear they trimmed it down to like 20 hours.
My TiVo series 1 from back in 1999 had a 22 hour capacity.
My current DirecTV DVR has like 460 hours or some such. 20 hours? That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t last a week with that.
Yeah, realistically I wouldn’t find a DVR, cloud or otherwise, with less than 100 hours remotely acceptable.
When you get right down to it, they should all offer unlimited storage like YouTube TV. Deduplication is incredibly powerful; everybody recording It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is recording the exact same content. The commercials vary but only by market, so maybe you have to record 200 total versions of the commercials. The space required is essentially negligible.