Electronics A lot of people are cutting the cord today, and getting rid of their cable-TV boxes or satellite-TV boxes in favor of a streaming TV box or stick. And whether you have canceled your cable contract or satellite-TV contract, or you’re using one of these streaming devices as an additional source of content, you need to take a look at these remotes. I's Why's No need to have 2 remotes for television and Fire TV(/streaming media service)Sideclick attaches to the side of a Fire TV remote; Piggyback replaces the backSideclick can be used with Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, and NexusPiggyback is only for Fire TV, but is less bulky than SideclickHere is how my family came to start using these: In 2015, my son decided that he wanted to be able to watch TV in his bedroom. Now, the funny thing is, we’ve had a TV in his bedroom for years; it’s just never been turned on. So when we went to turn it on, something was going on with the satellite box, and we couldn’t get it to change channels. It just so happens that we had just replaced one of our Amazon Fire TV sticks with an Amazon Fire TV box. I grabbed the stick, plugged it into my son’s TV and viola– he had full access to the Amazon Fire TV universe, as well as full access to our Plex server. The problem was, he would use one remote to turn the TV on and change the volume, and he would use the Amazon Fire TV remote to do all the other functions.This didn’t make a lot of sense, so I got him a Sideclick universal remote attachment to the Amazon Fire TV. This is a nifty little remote that attaches to the side of the Amazon Fire TV remote. So basically, it’s a smart remote. It has programmable buttons: power/plus/minus/up/down, as well as an additional button, and you can program these to whatever suits your needs. So now, when my son wants to watch TV in his room, he picks up his Amazon Fire TV remote with the Sideclick attached. He uses the power button on the Sideclick to turn the TV on, uses the plus/minus on the Sideclick to adjust the volume, and for everything else uses the Amazon Fire TV remote. Sideclick is a pretty bright company, and they’ve made these add-on remotes for the Roku, Apple TV Gen4, Apple TV Gen3 and the Nexus media player, in addition to the Amazon Fire TV.I’ve also found something called the Piggyback by Mission Cables, which is similar in function to the Sideclick, but they accomplish the same thing in a little different way. Instead of attaching to the side of the Amazon Fire TV remote, this replaces the back of the Amazon Fire TV remote.While it doesn’t offer as many programmable buttons, it’s perfect for what we need. The Piggyback has buttons you can program for power, input, volume up, volume down and mute. There is one other button for learning. We programmed the Piggyback remote with power, volume up and volume down, to change the input on the TV. The beautiful thing about the Piggyback is that it’s currently half the price of the Sideclick, but it’s only available for the Amazon Fire TV voice remote.I personally like using the Piggyback remote better than the Sideclick. It doesn’t really change the feel factor of the remote in your hand. The Sideclick makes it wider and a little trickier to use one-handed. That said, the Sideclick feels like a better-built product, and again, it fits a larger range of products.There are some rooms in our house where we do more streaming than anything else, and these units come in handy in those rooms. If you are using any of the streaming sticks mentioned in this review, I think you’ll find that this is a really good investment.
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