Pros & Cons
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- Slim design easily fits among crowded HDMI ports
- Can get power directly from your TV
- Wi-Fi 6
- Built-in Alexa
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- Updated Fire TV interface buries your bookmarks
- Limited local streaming features
Amazon's latest Fire TV Stick HD proves that small upgrades can make a big difference. The refreshed 1080p media streamer ditches the clutter with a slimmer, dongle-free design, draws power directly from your TV, and adds Wi-Fi 6 for smoother performance—all without raising the $34.99 price of the 2024 version. While the updated Fire TV interface doesn't entirely stick the landing, the hardware improvements and snappier performance make this one of the easiest and most affordable ways to breathe new life into an older TV, and earn the Fire TV Stick HD our Editors' Choice award for 1080p media streamers.
Design: Slimmer, Cleaner, and Truly Cable-Free
The Fire TV Stick HD measures 3.6 by 0.8 inches (LW), slightly longer but much thinner than its 3.4-by-1.2-inch (LW) predecessor. That’s less than a third of an inch wider than the stick’s HDMI plug itself. There’s no HDMI extender included, as earlier Fire TV Sticks had, but it isn’t needed when the stick itself is only as wide as the end of most HDMI cables to begin with. A USB-C port sits on one edge of the stick, another welcome upgrade from the micro USB port of previous models.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)Power Upgrade: Runs Directly From Your TV
The USB-C port is used for power, which leads me to the biggest internal hardware change. The stick is designed to run on the meager electricity your TV’s USB-A port can provide, using the included 14-inch USB-A-to-USB-C cable. While many media streaming sticks can work to some extent when plugged into a TV's USB port, their performance isn’t reliable and can be prone to crashes and reboots due to power dips.
The Fire TV Stick HD is only the third streamer I’ve seen designed to get power from your TV instead of a wall adapter, after the Roku Streaming Stick and Roku Streaming Stick Plus. It’s a convenient change, because with such a short cable, no extender, and no power adapter, the stick contributes almost nothing to any tangle of wires you might have behind your TV.
Remote: Familiar, Functional, Voice-Ready
The remote remains unchanged, a simple black rectangle with a glossy circular navigation pad near the top. Power and Alexa buttons sit above the pad along with a pinhole microphone for using Alexa. Menu and playback controls can be found in the center of the remote, with a volume rocker and dedicated service buttons for Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, and YouTube further down.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)Video and Connectivity: HDR Support Meets Wi-Fi 6 Speeds
As the HD in its name says, the Fire TV Stick HD is meant for watching media in high definition, or 1080p. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG). HDR gives it an edge over the 1080p Roku Streaming Stick, but keep in mind the TV also has to support HDR to see any benefit. HD resolution isn’t a heavy lift for a media streamer compared with 4K, so the new stick still uses a quad-core 1.7GHz processor and 8GB of RAM, though the CPU has been upgraded from an ARM Cortex-A53 to the newer ARM Cortex-A55.
It replaces Wi-Fi 5 with Wi-Fi 6, which addresses one of my complaints about the earlier model. Wi-Fi 6 is faster and better able to handle congested network environments, but you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6 router to take advantage of it.
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Interface: Slicker Look, Worse Navigation
Amazon rolled out a new user interface for its Fire TV platform, which comes preinstalled on the latest Fire TV Stick HD and will soon be pushed to other Fire TV devices. It looks cleaner, with big tiles offering friendlier-looking rounded corners than the stark rectangles it used to have.
(Credit: Amazon/PCMag)It also rearranges the device’s menu icons and moves them from a bar across the middle of the screen, disrupting its visual flow, to the very top. Most of the icons here are tabs for full-screen views of different types of content. From right to left, you'll see: Search, Home, Movies, TV Shows, Live TV, Sports, and News. The three-line icon on the left side of the row opens a drop-down menu with Settings, Ambient Mode, the Fire TV app store, Art & Photos (offering access to art collections available on Fire TV and your own pictures on Amazon Photos), Games (primarily Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming platform), Movies and TV (which seems to just return to the main home screen), and My Stuff (bookmarks).
Putting Settings, Ambient Mode, Photos, and Games in a sub-menu makes sense, since you’d likely want to engage with them less often than you would your favorite shows, movies, or sports games. Moving My Stuff to the sub-menu, on the other hand, seems counterintuitive. If I bookmark a piece of media, it’s because I want to watch it in the near future or, if it’s a show, I plan to watch episodes on a fairly regular basis. In putting My Stuff in a drop-down menu instead of a tab in the main interface, Amazon is shoving its recommendations in your face while demanding you work to find the things you already chose to watch. Sure, the Home and TV Show tabs have Continue Watching rows for picking up where you left off in a show, but even they require scrolling down the screen, because they’re never the first row or two. On my home screen, the first three rows are recommendations, apps, and then sponsored content. On the TV Shows screen, Continue Watching is five rows down. And neither shows My Stuff at any point.
(Credit: Amazon/PCMag)Otherwise, Fire TV behaves pretty much the same as it always did, with all the features as before. All major streaming services are available, including Amazon Prime Video (obviously), Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube. It lags behind other platforms for streaming from local devices, with only WiDi/Miracast for connections from compatible PCs, though. Roku’s media streamers have Apple AirPlay for streaming from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and Google TV media streamers like the Onn 4K Pro have Google Cast for streaming from Android devices. While AirPlay is on Amazon’s Fire TV-powered TVs like the Fire TV Omni Mini-LED, it’s nowhere to be found on its media streamers.
Alexa Integration: Smart Control at Your Fingertips
The Alexa voice assistant is integrated into Fire TV and accessible via the remote, letting you ask it questions, search for media, and control both it and any compatible entertainment or smart home devices with your voice. It isn’t hands-free, though; if you want to use Alexa without picking up the remote, you’ll need a Fire TV Cube or a Fire TV-powered television with far-field microphones. Even if you need to press a button to use Alexa, its presence on the Fire TV Stick HD gives the device much more functionality outside of entertainment than the Roku Streaming Stick, which has a voice search function but not a full voice assistant.
Performance: Faster Menus, Instant Playback
To give the new Fire TV interface some credit, it at least performs better. I found the 2024 Fire TV Stick HD to feel a bit choppy when navigating menus and switching tabs. On the latest gen, screens updated instantly instead of stuttering as I scrolled. This might be because of the updated system. Of course, it might also be thanks to the upgraded Cortex-A55 CPU or the Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. It’s probably some measure of all three. Either way, Fire TV scrolls more smoothly now.
Loading media is virtually instantaneous on the Fire TV Stick HD. Again, 1080p isn’t very bandwidth-intensive, but even so, Fallout and The Boys on Prime Video and the live-action One Piece on Netflix started playing the moment I selected them during testing. Even though the stick only outputs in HD, it sends a 1080p HDR signal whenever the media supports it. My LG C4 doesn’t support HDR10+ and the Fire TV Stick HD doesn’t support Dolby Vision, so playback defaulted to the more limited HDR10 format, but it still worked.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
Amazon Fire TV Stick HD (2026)
Amazon upgrades the affordable Fire TV Stick HD with a slimmer, adapter-free design, faster Wi-Fi, and smoother performance, making it an excellent media streamer for 1080p TVs.