Alexa Home Theater: Everything you need to know about Amazon's newest Echo feature Testing the spatial surround sound feature with the company's latest smart speakers. Amazon's new Echo Studio is one of two speakers that allow you to use Alexa Home Theater to its full potential. When Amazon's latest Echo speakers arrived in October, a feature the company spent time hyping during its fall devices event was missing. Alexa Home Theater arrived in late November, allowing owners of a recent Fire TV device and either of the new Echo speakers the ability to use up to five units and an Echo Sub as a surround sound setup. The main selling point is that the underlying tech allows you to put the speakers wherever you want and Alexa Home Theater will handle the rest.

Now that Amazon has not one but two Prime Days per year, you might think they'd run out of deals. The world's largest retailer has plenty of deals to go around for Black Friday, including these discounts on their own devices. And for this sale, you don't even have to be a Prime member to snag the savings. Amazon makes a slew of its own hardware, including Echo smart speakers, Fire tablets and Kindles. Most come with the ever-improving and evolving smart AI assistant Alexa, giving you the option of unifying your smart home and controlling it just by talking. Lots of these deals match or even beat Prime Day prices, so it's a great time to buy if you want to give the gift of a Kindle or ring in the new year with an Alexa-enabled Echo Show display.

Black Friday for Echo and Fire TV devices has already started -- Amazon knocked down the prices of many of its Echo gadgets today. Most of the sale prices are the same as we saw during Amazon Prime Day in June, or even better. Discounts of note are the Echo for $60 and the second-generation Echo Show 5 for $45. While the latest Echo Show 8 isn't on sale yet, the first-gen device bundled with a Blink Mini security camera is $80 off as well, bringing it down to $65. You probably already know the deal with Echo devices, but we'll recap here.

It doesn't take much time with Amazon's new Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite to understand what they're all about. The $40 third-generation Fire TV Stick is an overdue upgrade to Amazon's best-selling streaming player, replacing its four-year-old processor with one that's much faster. The $30 Fire TV Stick Lite, meanwhile, is a naked attempt to achieve price parity with Roku's budget Express streamer, with the same performance as the standard Stick but a major compromise to its remote control: There are no TV volume or power buttons onboard. Of the two, the Fire TV Stick is much easier to recommend than the Lite version. I've said it before, but having TV controls built into the remote really is worth the extra $10. Whether the new Fire TV Sticks are worth buying over other budget streamers is harder to say, because Amazon is preparing a major software overhaul for later this year.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham gives the pros and cons on the new Amazon Amazon Fire TV Recast, a DVR over-the-air television. LOS ANGELES -- The corporate spat between Google and Amazon ends today, with good news for TV viewers. The YouTube app, which brings the world's most popular video network to televisions, will be available, again on Amazon Fire TV devices and branded TVs. The companies announced in April that they had agreed to agree, but didn't offer a firm date for when it would become effective. In January 2018, YouTube vanished from Fire TV devices and the Amazon Echo Show.

The mere existence of Amazon's Fire TV Recast is a testament to how popular cord-cutting has become. Over-the-air DVR was once the domain of geeks whose living rooms ran on Windows Media Center. But as more people have dropped cable TV, we've seen more user-friendly approaches from the likes of TiVo, Tablo, Plex, Channels, and AirTV. Those options presumably helped inspire the Fire TV Recast, a $230 box that records free broadcast TV channels from an antenna and streams the video to Amazon's popular Fire TV devices. The Fire TV Recast is the most mainstream attempt yet at over-the-air DVR, and it shows in Amazon's simple and polished software.

The Fire TV Stick 4K is the media streamer that Amazon should have released years ago. Cooler than a Roku and much cheaper than an Apple TV, the new $50 streaming dongle offers 4K HDR video in every conceivable format while outperforming Amazon's more expensive Fire TV Cube ($120) and third-generation Fire TV ($70, now discontinued). It also corrects the stupidest mistake of previous Fire TV models by including TV volume and power controls on its remote control. Factor in powerful Alexa voice commands and you have a compelling 4K HDR streamer at any price, let alone the lowest price on the market. The Fire TV Stick 4K won't be for everyone.

When it works, controlling your TV with Amazon's Alexa digital assistant can feel like magic. Using voice commands avoids thumbing through menus and can get to what you want to watch much faster. But using Alexa as your TV remote requires a bit of know-how. Alexa won't understand everything you might want to do, and controlling your actual television and sound system requires specific equipment. To avoid potential frustration, we'll go through what you can and can't do with Alexa on Fire TV and other television devices, and explain how to set it all up.

If you're thinking of buying the Amazon Fire TV Cube because you're delighted by the idea of having an Amazon Echo and a Fire TV device mashed into one device, let me stop you right there. Alexa on a TV interface demands a level of conversation like no other streaming TV product I've used before. After a few nights of using the Cube, I began to hate the sound of my own voice. Maybe you'll still be delighted by the Cube at first if you buy one. Maybe if you have kids, they'll love shouting at the TV to get their cartoon fix. But there's a good chance you'll end up doing what I did: going back to the fuddy-duddy Fire TV remote, because that's the easiest way to scroll through multiple media options.

Shortly after setting up Amazon's Fire TV Cube streaming box, I temporarily lost the remote control. In theory, this shouldn't have been a problem. Amazon says its $120 Fire TV Cube is primarily a hands-free device that you can control with Alexa voice commands, and I knew Alexa would at least let me turn on the TV, control the volume, and start watching video in apps like Amazon Prime Video and PlayStation Vue without needing the remote. Still, it didn't take long with my Fire TV Cube review unit to uncover voice control's many blind spots. While the hardware does a fine job of recognizing voice commands, Alexa often fails at searching for content, is inconsistent at controlling video playback, and doesn't yet work with a large number of apps.