The Apple TV 4K. No, I haven’t tried them all but I did try a few. My first streamer back in the early days of HDTV was a Sony. I had buffering and freezing difficulties but only when streaming Amazon content, which was a lot of what I was watching. I bought an Amazon FireTV and those problems disappeared. I suspected, and still do, that when Amazon’s servers started reaching their streaming bandwidth limits, they prioritized their own devices.
I moved into a different house in a different state and upgraded my TV to a 4k capable 65″ model. My FireTV was supposed to be capable of 4K streaming but not HDR(High Dynamic Range) and it was laggy and buggy when streaming 4K content. I upgraded to a new FireTV 4K stick. This actually didn’t work much better. 4K streaming was laggy and buffered often. My TV is an internet connected smart TV and it streamed 4K just fine so I would just switch from the streamer to the TV’s direct connection for 4K movies. Inconvenient, but it worked. Why didn’t I just use the TV all the time? It’s a nice Vizio display (no tuner so not really a TV) but the available streaming apps are limited. It does have built in ChromeCast but casting from a phone to the TV is also a clunky way to browse and watch. I prefer a single point streaming solution.
Everything was tolerable for a year or so when one day I turned on my system to watch TV and I got an error message telling me my FireTV stick was out of memory and I needed to free up at least 500 megabytes in order to get my software update. I looked in the system settings and there already was about 6 meg free. I freed up some more and restarted the device. Next day I get the same error. A quick chat with Amazon tech support says I have to reset to defaults, update the firmware, then reload all my streaming apps. A large’ish pain in the rear but OK. Problem solved…….for about three months and then we are back to the “insufficient storage” errors.
Well, I am not going to be resetting and reloading this thing for the rest of my life so I started reading reviews to find a better solution. The general consensus is the Apple TV 4K is best. Not perfect. Maybe not even better enough to be worth almost double the price of the top end Roku but still the best. None of them seem to have expandable memory any more and I don’t want to have this problem again. Apple’s OS, when it starts getting short of storage, removes seldom used apps in the background while leaving the links to them. If you want to use them again, there is a bit of a delay as they reload. No user action required. Cool.
I bought one. Yes it’s more expensive than any other streamer but, with a $1000 TV and a $6000 surround sound system is $179 for a streamer really expensive? I like the user interface, and unlike some users, I love the remote control. Using a touchpad to scroll through screen options is faster and more intuitive than clicking arrow buttons or arrow buttons disguised as a disk. I found a bug, If I shut the streamer down while the Amazon Prime app is running, the Amazon app will hang when I fire it back up and I have to restart the box. Not a big deal. Picture quality is stunning. The Apple TV has some built in video screen savers filmed in beautiful 4K HDR. They are visually amazing. The only other small fly in the ointment is that by default it tries to convert all content to 4K HDR. Some of the HDR conversions have visible artifacts. The 4K upsampling looks great. You can turn off the HDR conversion and view all streams in their original dynamic range. This works great but it does cause about a 10 second black screen delay from selecting a show to watching the show as my TV configures itself. Nothing is perfect, but the annoyances are minor, the video performance is stellar and the user interface looks like it was designed by people that used it. If you’re happy with your current streaming solution, why spend money? If you’re not, or it fails, I recommend trying one of these. If you don’t like it, send it back. I bet you won’t.
