re: Not happy with my Fire TV so far

Neflix, as far as I know, will at least adjust quality based on your available bandwidth.

Not sure how Amazon Instant behaves, but I did witness it working surprisingly OK on a slow connection recently. I bought my dad a fire TV stick for Christmas. My parents live in a rural part of Florida, where the only cable and internet options are satellite, and cell data routinely switches between 3G and EDGE. He was using hughesnet, but one of his neighbors started his own ISP. He's apparently renting a few hundred mbps worth of fiber, running it to towers with wifi transmitters all around the lake that the community lives on, and selling subscriptions with no caps. My dad switched to that, and he said it's been much more reliable.

Unfortunately, he's only provisioned for 1.5 Mbps. The whole family was there for a few days over Christmas, including a niece and 5 nephews who each received new iPod touches for Christmas, and a sister-in-law who got a new laptop. With everyone on their new and existing devices, it was basically impossible to do anything but browse the internet. Couldn't even get the Fire Stick to download the update it needed before we could set it up. Once everyone went to bed, things moved a lot quicker, and we were surprisingly able to stream World War Z from Amazon without a hiccup. It just took a little while to buffer initially, but the more important thing is the uninterrupted streaming once it actually starts.