Done Did It

[BarryBobPosthole]

Okay so I bought myself Amazon Fire TV. I posted earlier where I was looking into it. I got the box because it has 8g of memory vs 2, and its expandable using micro SD cards and the stick isn't. I got the package that included an HD antenna just because it was cheap and I wanted to see how it worked. My goal in this is not to get completely off of cable immediately, but to cut my cable bill down now and explore getting rid of it completely as we learn the streaming gig.

First thing I did was to jail break it. That was easy enough.I've also been learning how to find and download apps. Downloaded a couple of apps to start searching for live sports and movies. let me say this about that. Theres a bunch of both out there. But its a shady world. Lots of developers, lots of websites, lots of apps. I've still not figured out what the motivation is for a developer, since there's no money involved in any of it. The legality is dubious, but I've yet to do anything against the law and I don't plan to. I will say, it is apparent the streaming thing is exploding. I expect the content providers to pay attention at some point. The links to streams you want to watch in a given app might work one day and not work the next. So a serious tv or movie watcher might have to check two or three apps to find what they're looking for. Not what we're used to.
I can't see this completely replacing cable content. For me, just the non-jailbroken stuff in Amazon TV will save me a hundred bucks a month on my cable-internet-phone package. That pays for itself in one month. basically, that is because we'll reduce our channels from 400+ to 200 and we are Prime members for other services already.

The streaming on it works good with no buffering issues so far.

Now I'm researching setting up a vpn. Who knows about that? I want to make my shit more secure and it seems this builds a ip-address wall between me and the world.

BKb

[Chicken Dinner]

I've got nothing to add, but am following closely as I'd love to ditch my cable company...

[Thumper]

I must be a dinosaur. I have no clue WTF you're talking about. ;)

I installed basic cable (NO extras) when I bought the house in 1989 ... it hasn't changed. As for Internet, I thought it was a big deal when DSL became available and I got off of dial-up ... I'm still on DSL! I'm from the old school "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" era I suppose. What I have, works for me.

[LJ3]

You have to be REAL careful what apps you install. The black market is full of nefarious individuals. All those types of sites are loaded with malware, trojans, keyloggers and all kinds of bad shiznit. Even if you setup a firewall or proxy to the internet it doesn't address the real threat. If you install an app, you are allowing it on your inside trusted network. All your PC's, all the personal information on the PCs and any other device you may connect to your home wireless or wired networks. Locking the front door doesn't help if you're giving the crooks a seat right next to the safe :)

My personal recommendation is to avoid jailbreaking and downloading apps unless you can monitor the traffic and see what it's doing (Fios firewall has this capability.)

Another option is to build a network segment where the only device on it is the amazon device, assuming you have a smart tv connected to it. That would prevent the amazon device from being able to see anything else on your inside network.

[BarryBobPosthole]

That's the approach I am takng, Len. I'm looking at a vpn service called Nordvpn that you can either set up on your router or on your firetv box itself, which I think is what you're talkng about. And like you said, its hard to know what a trusted app is and what isn't. Right now I'm only downloading apps that are recommended by like PC World and shit. And of course hat's no guarantee of anythng other than a lot of other peole are using them with no issues.

Its gonna be a learning process.

BKB

[LJ3]

OK, you're in decent shape then. Avoid any of the torrent sites and black market shit.