As the much-loved Amazon FireStick approaches its 10th birthday, the product’s impressive longevity is illustrated by its ever-growing versatility. Once recognized as a revolutionary piece of hardware for our entertainment needs, the FireStick has grown into a leading smart home hub in its own right.
First launched in November 2014, the arrival of smart home functionality came as a relatively recent addition to the USB stick’s repertoire, with a Smart Home Dashboard added as an update to FireStick in 2021.
The Smart Home Dashboard empowers users to control the lighting in different rooms, air conditioning, and has the power to interact with voice assistants. Crucially, the addition of live camera feed monitoring and smart doorbell integration has turned Amazon’s FireStick into a powerful home security solution.
FireStick’s New Frontier in Smart Security
The beauty of Amazon’s new Smart Home Dashboard feature for FireStick is that it transforms any smart TV into its very own smart security hub.
With the ability to control lighting, smart plugs, and virtually every other cloud-based device at the touch of a button, it’s possible to ensure that all rooms are appropriately lit and any surveillance technology is capable of running unmissable alerts at all times.
Importantly, FireStick’s Fire TV service can also offer live feeds of any integrated smart camera around the house. This means that your video doorbell can display who’s at the door while you’re watching your favorite series.
While this can be a great way of knowing whether it’s worth interrupting your show to answer the door, or if you’re free to continue watching while ignoring another salesman, it can also help you to quickly become aware of possible suspicious activity.
The Fire TV Smart Home Dashboard can be accessed by asking Alexa to “show my Smart Home Dashboard,” and for FireStick users, this command will need to be made while holding the microphone or Alexa icon to work.
Burglar Deterrents at the Touch of a Button
With the addition of smart lighting controls, users can ensure that their homes are appropriately lit in an energy-efficient manner while watching TV or a movie.
Particularly for individuals who live in homes that are prone to becoming the target of burglars, keeping the right lights on as a deterrent in the evenings can be an effective way to keep points of entry in plain sight without having to move around the home to switch on the lights.
This feature is excellent for the many of us who like to watch TV before going to sleep. With FireStick, one prompt can switch off your house lights to ensure that your home is well-lit and safe against criminals who may see a darkened point of entry as an opportunity for a break-in.
Additionally, FireStick can help users to keep warm when controlling outdoor lights in cold, winter months. For many of us, keeping our porches illuminated in the evenings is a great safety measure to deter burglars. Fire TV has the power to ensure that we’ll no longer need to wrap up warm to control our porch lights in the middle of watching a TV show.
Live Camera Feeds Offer Unprecedented Control
The reason Amazon’s FireStick and Fire TV are such an innovative security solution is because they provide unprecedented control of your property.
While video doorbells have become far more commonplace in recent years, monitoring suspicious activity on smartphones means that there’s a greater risk of users missing something important.
Because 34% of criminals gain entry through the front door of homes, surveillance in the form of video doorbells or front-entry CCTV cameras can hold vital information should your home become targeted.
Televisions have become great tools for monitoring suspicious activity as the quality of surveillance camera resolutions becomes richer. For those who are fearful of being targeted by criminals, the ability to view surveillance cameras on large HD television screens can be an excellent way of gaining a sense of security at home, or to comprehensively check out a strange noise outside without having to leave the sofa.
VPN Functionality for Comprehensive Privacy
Another excellent FireStick feature is its seamless compatibility with virtual private networks (VPNs).
VPNs work via digital connections between a device or computer and a remote server owned by the VPN provider. This establishes a point-to-point tunnel that actively encrypts your personal data, masks your IP address, and allows you to access websites without the limitations of geo-restrictions and firewalls.
This helps to establish more secure, private connections online and prevents your browsing activities from being traceable.
While using VPNs on FireStick has great advantages in terms of accessing content like geo-locked Netflix shows worldwide, it also helps to ramp up your home security.
One of the biggest security risks we face at home doesn’t come in the form of burglars or criminals outside but from online surveillance by ISPs (internet service providers), governments, and third parties with questionable intentions.
By adding a FireStick VPN to your home security system, you can turn your online activity anonymous, keeping your real-world location safer thanks to enhanced encryption functionality. This allows you to browse the internet freely without the risk of your personal information like card data becoming compromised online.
There are many premium and free virtual private networks available to download via your FireStick, so it’s important to discover a trusted review of FireStick VPNs to help guide you through the selection process and discover a provider that offers genuine security while maintaining strong connection speeds and the other major perks that make FireStick great.
With the right VPN system in place, you can freely monitor your interconnected devices to build a smart security fortress for your home without the danger of doxxing your location or leaving your payment or personal data vulnerable to exploitation.
Most of the best premium-quality VPNs can help you access servers in several countries around the world based on their connection speeds. This means that you can not only overcome the drawbacks of internet throttling from your internet service provider but also enjoy the best TV shows and movies from anywhere in the world.
Building Relevance in the Cloud
The best thing about the Amazon FireStick is its ability to continue building relevance and purpose at a time when technology is advancing at a rapid rate.
The role of the FireStick as an entertainment hub was destined to be challenged as smart TVs became more adaptable and powerful enough to host their own streaming apps in recent years, but the ever-popular USB device’s transformation into a leading home security tool shows that its relationship with the cloud is as strong as ever.
With FireStick and Fire TV capable of uniting cloud-enabled devices to manage using our smart TVs, there’s plenty of room for future developments and intelligent integrations as the technology continues to evolve.
Amazon has already sought to introduce cloud-based gaming, music, and more intuitive collaborations with voice assistants in recent years. The FireStick could yet become an ‘everything’ tool for the ‘Internet of Things’ revolution.
Whether we’ll all be leaning heavily on our FireSticks to manage all of our cloud-based devices in the future remains to be seen. But for now, the comfort of knowing that Amazon’s Smart Home Dashboard gives us unprecedented control over our home safety is enough to see the FireStick’s worth as a home security essential.