Sirius XM app adds music, sports and news to Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick

Sirius XM rolled out a new app for Amazon Fire TV, bringing a lot great music and on-demand content into your home. The Sirius XM app will be a very welcome addition to home entertainment systems.

All the music, news, sports, and comedy that you listen to in your car is now also in your home. You just need to subscribe to their online streaming option.

Simply download the free app from the Amazon site, and use your Sirius XM login credentials to get some streaming going from your Fire TV device.  By the way, you’ll need a subscription to Sirius XM to start using their app.

Over a couple hours of testing, the Sirius XM app delivered a very smooth performance without a single interruption.

Menu options on Sirius XM app on Fire TV

The main menu on the Sirius XM app breaks down 155 channels into categories for music, news, sports, comedy and more. Select music and you can navigate through stations by genre.

When you’re listening to a song, there are two options on the screen worth paying attention to. Right under the name of the performer, the More Like This feature will pull up channels with similar styles of music.

In the upper right hand corner of the screen, you’ll also find the Custom Mix option, which lets you adjust the style of what you’re listening. For example, while checking out some music on the Chill channel, I had options to shape my playlist.

One bar lets me adjust for more or less vocals. With channel style, I can choose from a spectrum of options — from Deep House Chill to Traditional Chill. My mood options ranged from lighter to darker. Pretty neat. These are similar options available to subscribers with online accounts, which are used on a PC or smartphone app.

The search feature on the Sirius XM app is predictive. This is a pretty nice option considering most people don’t add a keyboard to their Fire TV set up. So if I type in “BB” using the onscreen keyboard, I get results for B.B. King’s Bluesville channel, BBC Radio 1 and BBC World Service. I can move over to the list with the wheel button on my remote and select what I want to listen to.

For fun, I also typed in “on demand” to see if the search function pulled up content. Yes! I recommend going to the main menu for on-demand content. But it’s another neat option for those of us who want to peruse the entire catalog and see what’s available.

The favorite channels section will pick up your saved channels that you listen to in your vehicle.

How else can I stream Sirius XM at home?

Before this app, there were few ways to stream Sirius XM inside your home. If you subscribed to listening online, you could listen to a Sirius XM feed to your computer or smartphone. That option costs you extra cash.

Otherwise, you would need to shell out some more money to buy more hardware. You can still buy a kit to hook up your car receiver to the stereo inside your home. Sirius XM also sells a portable speaker dock. If you buy either one of those, make sure your receiver model is compatible.

The Fire TV is now saving you some cash while adding some much needed awesomeness to your home entertainment setup. My Fire TV is hooked up via Ethernet and also wired to a harmon/kardon stereo receiver.

There are already some other great music streaming options for Fire TV. I personally love using the Tune-In app to listen to some great stations like KEXP in Seattle, and K-Jazz in L.A. You can also use that same app for an Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, or your smartphone.

My wife and I began subscribing to Amazon Prime earlier this year. One of the most underrated features with Prime is Amazon Music. I had already been using the app for my phone and it works a lot like Spotify. This weekend, I finally started using it on my Fire TV to listen to a few Charles Bradley albums while I put together some furniture. I was really impressed with the sound coming from my speakers.

If you don’t have a Sirius XM subscription yet, check out some of the offers being made to new members.

More Amazon Fire TV Channels like HBO

There’s something else that’s significant with the debut of the Sirius XM app on Fire TV. Critics have often panned Fire TV as being too focused around their own content via Amazon Prime. That’s changed quite a bit in 2016. The latest voice features added to Alexa remotes have been for searching Netflix and HBO.

Amazon is continuing to carve its own path in the realm of cord cutting by offering HBO and Cinemax to Prime members.

HBO subscriptions are $14.99 per month, and Cinemax is priced at $9.99 per month.

Subscriptions are being offered through Amazon Channels. Prime members get a 30-day free trial for HBO.