For some time now Amazon’s Fire TV Edition smart TVs have had support for antennas. This allowed owners of the Fire TV smart TVs to connect an antenna and watch their antenna through their Fire TV smart TV. Many have hoped this support would come to a Fire TV one day. Well, we have good news. The code is there; however, don’t look for it to be made live.
Back in January Amazon launched a TV guide that allowed you to see what was on supported networks like HBO, Showtime, Starz, and Cinemax on your streaming player. This week there was some excitement online when one of our readers noticed that guide also has the code to scan for local channels and add them to the Fire TV’s channel guide.
Currently, the feature does not seem to work because it cannot find any USB tuners. It looks like the Fire TV has the software to support a TV tuner to watch TV from your antenna through the Fire TV if Amazon ever adds the ability to support USB tuners for your antenna.
Here are some pictures of the Fire TV stick displaying the ability to add locals from an antenna on the Fire TV Stick:
Our reader found the feature when he asked his Echo to show him a guide. (It also works when you ask Alexa through your voice remote to show you a TV guide.) When he clicked on the guide it gave him this menu on his Fire TV Stick. Sadly, there was no option to scan for channels. It just offered the ability to manage channels you already have installed.
The sad news is it looks like Amazon just didn’t remove the code from the version they use for the Fire TV edition smart TVs. It looks like most of the code for the smart TV version of the Fire TVs is still in the Fire TV Cube, Fire TV, and Fire TV Stick versions.
Support for USB tuners has been the dream of Fire TV, Roku, and Apple TV owners. Many crave the ability to have everything easily managed through one remote without having to switch between inputs. A few devices have launched, like the Air TV and Stream+, offering that feature but many have hoped that the Fire TV would add that ability without needing to buy a new TV.
For now, that dream still seems to be a dream.
Cord Cutters News did reach out to Amazon for comment on this story and did not receive a reply to our requests for comment.
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