Amazon has been busy. Today, the company is launching a new Fire TV Stick HD – its slimmest streaming stick yet – along with the Ember Artline, a lifestyle TV that doubles as a piece of wall art and, notably, is a Freely TV.
On top of that, the long-awaited new Fire TV interface is finally getting a UK release date, and new free, ad-supported streaming channels are coming directly to the Fire TV live TV guide.
There’s quite a bit to get through, so let’s take it one thing at a time.
The New Fire TV Stick HD
The headline product for us is the new Fire TV Stick HD, which Amazon is pitching as its most portable streaming stick yet.
The most immediately obvious change is the size. The new HD stick is about 30% narrower than the previous generation, making it genuinely pocketable – useful if you travel and want to bring your streaming setup with you.
But the more practical day-to-day benefit is that it fits more easily behind your TV, taking up less space around the HDMI port and leaving room for other cables and plugs.
It also has a neat trick up its sleeve: it’s designed to run directly off your TV’s USB port, with no separate power adapter needed (much like the newer Roku sticks).
Most modern TVs have at least one USB port, so in many cases you’ll be able to plug the stick straight in and forget about it – no extra cable trailing to a wall socket.
That’s a small but welcome improvement for tidying things up behind the telly.
Amazon says the new stick is more than 30% faster than the previous HD model when it comes to turning on and opening apps.
Looking at the spec sheet, the processor and GPU are the same as before – a quad-core 1.7 GHz chip with an IMG GE8300 GPU – so the speed gains are likely down to software and OS optimisation rather than a hardware leap.
In practice, though, faster is faster, and the old HD stick could feel sluggish at times.
The rest of the specs are what you’d expect at this price point: 8GB of storage, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and a maximum resolution of 1080p at 60fps.
There’s HDR10 and HDR10+ support, but no Dolby Vision and no Dolby Atmos – you get Dolby Digital passthrough instead. It comes with the 2024 Alexa Voice Remote in the box.
There’s also an accessibility feature called Adaptive Display coming to the stick “in the coming months.”
When turned on, it increases the size of text, menus, and content artwork to create a more balanced, easier-to-read browsing experience, with multiple size options to choose from.
Vega Inside
One thing worth making clear for anyone who’s been following the saga of Amazon’s newer Fire TV Stick 4K Select: the new HD stick is another Vega OS device.
Unlike the previous Fire TV HD stick, which ran the standard Android-based Fire OS (the same platform that’s powered Fire TV sticks for years), this new version runs Vega OS – just like the Fire TV 4K Select stick.
That means you get access to a smaller library of apps (for now, at least), and – sideloading is out of the question (unless you’re a developer, and even then it’s a rather complicated process).
- The new Fire TV Stick HD is available to pre-order now at £39.99, with shipping starting later this month.
Is It Worth Buying?
I’ve always been a bit sceptical about the popularity of HD sticks in this day and age – yet Amazon tells me there’s still surprising demand for these entry-level sticks.
So here’s my honest take (before a full review) – as a standalone product, the new Fire TV Stick HD is a decent streaming stick. It seems fast, it’s compact, the USB power is useful, and it runs the full Fire TV experience… well, almost.
The same reservations I had about the Fire TV Select – namely, Vega OS and it’s limited (for now) selection of apps – is true here.
So for anyone who just wants something simple and affordable to stream Netflix, iPlayer, and the rest on a 1080p TV, perhaps on a second TV at home or for travelling – it still does the job well.
But during Black Friday or Prime Day, the price gap between the HD stick and the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus narrows considerably, and the 4K Plus gives you quite a lot more: 4K streaming, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, Wi-Fi 6, and 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB.
At full price, there’s a £20 gap between the two – that’s a meaningful difference. During a sale, it can shrink to a fiver, at which point it’s very hard to justify the HD over the Plus.
So: a good stick at £39.99, but one to reconsider when the deals roll around.
The Amazon Ember Artline
The bigger and pricier announcement is the Amazon Ember Artline – Amazon’s answer to Samsung’s The Frame, and the company’s first lifestyle TV designed to hang on your wall and look like a piece of art when you’re not watching it.
First, a naming note: Amazon is taking the opportunity of the Artline’s launch to rename its entire smart TV range. What were previously called “Amazon Fire TV” televisions will now be called Amazon Ember TVs.
The Artline is the first product under the new Ember branding, and going forward, all new Amazon TV sets will carry the Ember name. This is good news for everyone who’s had to tie themselves in knots trying to say “Fire TV TV” or “Fire TV television set” – we can all breathe a little easier now.
The Artline is a 4K QLED television with a matte, anti-glare screen – the matte finish being important, since glossy screens are a poor choice for displaying static art.
It comes with access to a curated collection of over 2,000 art pieces at no extra cost, covering everything from Impressionist classics to contemporary photography.
There’s also an AI feature called Match the Room: take a photo of your living room through the Fire TV mobile app, and it’ll suggest artwork from the collection that fits the colours and feel of your space.
I had a chance to see the Artline TVs in action at an Amazon event, and I’ll be honest: when the TV is in art mode, it really does look the part. It’s impressive how much it resembles a framed print on the wall rather than a switched-off screen.
The Artline comes in 55 inches at £949.99 and 65 inches at £1,199.99. It comes with a choice of 10 frame colours, which are magnetic and designed to be swapped out easily.
I did try swapping one at the event, and I’ll admit my first instinct was that I was about to break something expensive – it feels slightly alarming the first time. But once you get the hang of it, it really is straightforward.
On the specs side: it’s a 4K LED panel running at 60Hz, with HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ Adaptive, and Dolby Vision support.
You get three HDMI 2.0 ports and one HDMI 2.1 with eARC, Wi-Fi 6, and 20W of total audio output with Dolby Digital Plus. It runs Fire OS – the standard Android-based platform – and comes with the new Fire TV interface out of the box.
The 60Hz refresh rate is worth flagging if you’re a gamer: this is not the TV for PS5 gaming. If you want 4K/120Hz for smoother gaming performance, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
The Artline Is A Freely TV
One of the more significant details about the Ember Artline – and one that deserves proper attention – is that it’s a Freely-certified TV.
As Cord Busters readers surely know by now, Freely is the streaming platform from Everyone TV (the organisation behind Freeview and Freesat) that delivers live and on-demand UK broadcast TV over broadband rather than an aerial or satellite dish.
That means BBC One, ITV1, Channel 4, Channel 5, and more – all streamed over your internet connection, with no aerial required.
Amazon has been selling Fire TV Freely TVs for a while (alongside Freeview Play TVs), though that always brings the question – are we ever going to get a Freely app on a Fire TV stick? Hard to say, but not anytime soon, I’m afraid.
That said, Freely on the Artline behaves exactly as it does on every other Freely device: it’s completely self-contained.
You load the Freely app separately, and once you’re in it, you’re in its own world. You can’t control it with Alexa, it doesn’t show up in Fire TV’s universal search, and there’s no integration with the rest of the Fire TV interface.
At the event, I also found it a little slow to load initially – though once it got going, playback was smooth.
- The Ember Artline is available to pre-order now and ships May 7th.
Fire TV Channels
Also coming in the next few weeks is Amazon’s own take on FAST channels – free, ad-supported streaming channels that have become a staple on pretty much every streaming platform going.
Called Fire TV Channels, they’ll cover sports, music videos, comedy, cooking, travel, lifestyle, and more, and will appear as part of the Fire TV interface (but not on the live TV guide for some reason) – without needing any downloads, sign-ups, or separate subscriptions.
The New Fire TV Interface – Finally Coming to the UK
We’ve written about the new Fire TV interface at length before, but here’s a quick recap for those catching up: it’s the biggest redesign of the Fire TV experience since 2020, promising up to 30% speed improvements and a cleaner, better-organised layout.
The most noticeable change is the navigation menu moving back to the top of the screen – yes, back to the top, having moved to the side in 2020.
Content is now organised by type (movies, TV shows, sports, live) across all your subscribed services in one place, rather than making you jump between apps.
You can also pin up to 20 apps on your home screen, up from six previously.
One detail worth mentioning: the text labels above the navigation icons are hidden until you scroll down to that row, which keeps the home screen looking noticeably cleaner and less cluttered at first glance. It’s a small touch, but a nice one.
The new interface starts rolling out to UK devices at the end of April – with the new Fire TV Stick HD and Ember Artline getting it first out of the box, and older compatible devices receiving it as a free software update over the following months (Amazon assured me it will also be coming to the Select stick at some point.)
Alexa+ on Fire TV – Amazon’s more conversational AI assistant – follows the same rollout timeline, arriving first on the new devices before expanding to older hardware.
For more TV and streaming news, Subscribe to our free newsletter.
A better home screen for who, removing the app drawer to force you back to the home screen to go through an ad just to change apps is a deal breaker.
From “Amazon Fire T.V.” to “Amazon Ember T.V.”
Presumably the fire has nearly burnt itself out!
(Sorry, but someone had to say it.)