Beginning to have thoughts now on just donating away my stream sticks and use my TV in the living room as a back up incase the one I have in my bedroom dies.
I got into streaming sticks about a few months ago, I have an ONN brand one and Amazon one that’s 4k. And I know the appeal of them and the appeal is nice. It makes you feel like you’re watching cable television without subscribing to an overpriced cable subscription. It was nice.
It was nice until everytime I go to have some sit down time in the living room than my bedroom to watch something there, I turn on the ONN stick, I try watching a single YouTube video.
30 second ad. Skipped it. 4 minutes into the video - another ad. And this will happen the longer the video is where it’s just ad, ad, ad.
Between the two, only the ONN stick has a chance of being rooted but I’m not sure I want to risk bricking or ruining it. The Amazon one cannot be rooted which is a shame.
So yeah, not really digging stream sticks as much as I like because of this. I immediately went back to my bedroom to watch on the PC since I have adblock.
You don’t need to root it to install other, more useful apps.
For example you can run your own Plex server on a spare PC, download movies and TV shows (I hear you can use torrents for this), and install the Plex app on your TV stick to watch them on the TV. Or, ask a friend for access to their Plex server :)
If you like cable TV, you can sign up to a much cheaper IPTV service and use the TiviMate app.
On the Onn one, I think you can just use Google Play to install other apps. On the Amazon Fire one, if it’s not in Amazon’s app store, you’ll have to download the APK file.