For me, I find the Chromecast to be a better made device that works better for its intended purpose. The Amazon Fire Stick is an altogether standalone which is really nice, but on the software front, it isn't ready for prime time.

Great at $20, not worth it at $40, yet at least.

I got another email from Amazon and the shipping estimate was bumped up again and my stick might be shipping on Thursday.

yeah, mine was originally going to be shipped to be on dec 24th but it got bumped up to tomorrow

it was delivered at around 9pm last night. i was surprised. I'll try and set it up with XBMC today or tomorrow

Found the YouTube app, thanks for letting me know it exists.

I installed SPMC (an android friendlier branch of XBMC) onto my fire stick and its working great. If the WWE Network and Netflix will work okay on it, i wont have to turn on the PS3 as much, so thats good.

I plan on tweaking a few of the settings today as recommended on the Plex forum. Tried it out last night and the wireless strength wasn't all that great and the Netflix image was choppy at times.

My stick shipped on Thursday, but I won't get it until Monday or Tuesday. I have been reading the reviews from users here and reviews from different sites. I'm seeing mixed views.

Couldn't get through some shows on Hulu+ without constant freezing every few minutes. Hoping it gets better, but not an impressive start.

I ran into the same thing. My router is literally less than 3 feet from my Fire Stick and it has zero issues streaming Amazon or Netflix content. For some reason it stutters on every Hulu show we try to watch, though. I've noticed the soft image in XBMC, but so far it seems to be good enough to replace my Raspberry Pi and PS3 (aside from Hulu+). Hopefully Hulu optimizes their app for the Stick.

Why XBMC? The things you want are already apps for the stick. Maybe reset the device and see if Hulu would work as-is?

I only use it to occasionally access my mkv files on the NAS as well as some of the channels that aren't currently in the App Store. To be clear, I didn't root the thing at all, so sideloading an app shouldn't affect performance like this, especially since it's the only video app that has stuttering/buffering issues.

Fire TV gets HBO GO starting today:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/15/7...tv-adds-hbo-go

NOTE: Fire TV "stick" won't get it until Spring of 2015. HBO GO for original Fire TV box only for now.

UPDATE #2: According to this link, Comcast subscribers cannot activate HBO GO on the Fire TV:

http://gizmodo.com/hbo-go-is-now-ava...-tv-1671387980

Comcast is apparently gouging companies to enable HBO Go on their devices.

So I gave one of these to my dad to use, it wipes settings everytime something updates which is annoying as hell.

I got my order on Tuesday. I watched on Amazon Prime and everything played well. I'll probably do some more streaming via the stick this weekend.

When I read that the Fire Stick would have the feature of being to log-in to hotel wifi services with their splash pages, it was a no-brainer to buy this for $20.

It works great at home.

But, in my stays this holiday season in hotels, I learned that the feature allowing one to log-in to hotel wifi/splash pages is not yet part of the Amazon Fire Stick. Apparently, this feature is supposedly coming sometime in 2015. Seems to me they should have said that when advertising ("coming soon").

Anyone been able to use teir Fire Stick to log-in to hotel wifi with splash pages?

No, that's something that no other streaming stick (to my knowledge) has been able to accomplish. I knew this was coming with the Fire Stick, but I also knew it hadn't been completed yet.

Do the Roku and Fire TV have the same problem? I know they're a little larger and not as convenient to carry, but they would still easily fit into most luggage.

We are seeing this as well. The Hulu+ channel on the Roku suffered from the same issue until about a year ago, so hopefully it's just a matter of optimizing the Fire TV app someday.

We have been using the Stick daily at my in-laws' house (which has a considerably better wireless router and a considerably faster internet connection than we do at home), and we are still having constant connectivity issues despite the signal always being "excellent" or "very good" and using the HDMI extension cable to help reposition it. I don't think we have been able to watch a single 30-minute show without at least one "buffering" hiccup. The interface doesn't seem quite as laggy as it did the first time I tested it at home, however.

I'm still not impressed, and wouldn't dream of using this as our primary streaming device.

Chromecast does have the problem, so I'd imagine those two would as well. The problem is that most hotels have a login prior to being able to use the internet, and streaming devices can't get around that (yet). Phones used as hotspots don't help, but I can't remember why. The whole thing pissed me off while on a trip.

It is problematic any way you look at it, they didn't do good R&D on the Wifi included inside the stick.

Any device that doesn't have a built-in web browser is likely to have the problem. I'm hoping they throw in a minimal web browser into future versions of the Roku. Can you sideload a web browser onto the Fire TV? That may fix the issue there.

Otherwise you're stuck using a travel router to get it working right.

Using a travel router is pretty simple, so long as you know some basic router stuff. I got a HooToo TripMate and the instructions were very clear and easy to follow. And they're cheap (under $20). I ended up buying the $33 model with the built-in battery.

http://www.amazon.com/HooToo-TripMat...dp/B00DTPYRTI/
http://www.amazon.com/HooToo-TripMat...dp/B00HZWOQZ6/

And it's not just good for video streaming. I've found that plugging a travel router into the hotel's ethernet port and creating my own wifi hotspot usually gives me better results than using the hotel's wifi network.

It does, you have to keep in mind that there are a ton of people using the Wifi in the hotels, having your own private hotspot, especially on a different channel, will help a lot.

Anyone else find that the Fire TV Stick performed less reliably than Chromecast? I just returned the one I bought over the weekend; it constantly loss the WiFi signal and Hulu was laggy and glitchy. The Chromecast works fine; I did pick up an actual Fire TV box and was gonna run a wired connection to it and see if I get better performance from it than I did the stick.

The stick has some of the worst Wifi performance I've ever seen in terms of reliability.