This is a silly question but do I have to be rooted in order to read from a USB drive? No matter what USB drive I put in my Amazon Fire TV, it does not see it. I am running 14.2 beta
There is a fairly strong rumor that Amazon is going to finally enable the USB port for USB storage in a future AFTV update. If that turns out to be true, that means you won't require root for USB storage. Only time will tell, though.
I have not actually tried this, but add from zip has access to all usual network services. You should be able to put the zip file somewhere on your network.