What you need to know
- Live shows will get better placement on the busy Amazon Fire TV home screen.
- It'll work with OTT services as well as channels over an antenna.
- The Live tab lands in the United States first.
Prime Video might be Amazon's bread and butter when it comes to Fire TV, but the company finally has seen the light when it comes to live shows. The Fire TV OS is getting a tab dedicated to live TV, as announced by the company in a post on Medium.
The top-level section "brings together your live sports, news, and channels from select OTT services, streaming apps (e.g. PlayStation Vue), paid subscriptions, and over-the-air antennas into one consolidated view."
It's very much akin to the excellent (but absolutely underutilized) Live Channels app on Android TV. It'll consolidate live offerings from OTT streaming services like Philo and PlayStation Vue, as well as from over-the-air antennas and, of course, the Fire TV Recast DVR box.
The Live tab also will be populated with content from sports from such channels as HBO, Showtime, MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, PGA Tour Live and more — all of which happen to be channels to which you can subscribe directly as an Amazon Prime Video Channel.
You'll be able to customize the order of the channels in the dedicated rows by designating the most important ones as favorites, Amazon says.
Amazon says the new Live tab will be rolling out to Fire TV users in the United States over the next week or so.
The best way to use Fire TV
This little stick has all the features you want from Fire TV, including 4K resolution, Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio.
Fire TV Recast (From $229 at Amazon)
Plug in an over-the-air antenna and record live TV straight into your Amazon Fire TV Stick.
