Back in June, Apple raised eyebrows when it increased the price of its Apple TV 4K set-top box by a stunning 67% for the largest model. The 64GB version of the Apple TV 4K now costs $199 (£146), up from $129 (£95), while the 128GB mode now costs a whopping $249 (£182), up from just $149 (£109) before.
Fast-forward a month, and then Roku suddenly announced similar price increases across the board, with its streaming sticks, streaming boxes and soundbars all being slapped with much higher price tags. The biggest increase saw Roku’s Streaming Stick 4K go up from $49.99 (£36) to a staggering $79.99 (£58), representing a 60% jump. Analysts said at the time that the price increases were surprising, considering that the vast majority of Roku’s revenue now comes from showing ads to its users, rather than hardware sales.
Unfortunately, it seems there’s no escape from the dreaded price increases. If anyone was thinking, “oh well, I can still afford a Fire Stick,” they’ll have to think again, for Amazon has now quietly revealed that its streaming devices are going to cost a lot more, too.
The company is upping its prices on no less than five streaming devices, including the Fire TV Stick HD, Fire TV Stick 4K Select, Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, Fire TV Stick 4K Max and its most powerful hardware, the Fire TV Cube. Its prices are going up by more than 40% in the case of the latter three devices. For instance, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max used to cost $59.99, (£43) but now retails for $84.99 (£62), while the Fire TV Cube has gone up from $139.99 (£102) to $199.99 (£146).
Amazon’s decision to increase its prices has been blamed on the rising cost of RAM and storage chips, which are all in massive demand because of the AI boom. Memory chip makers like Samsung and Micron are increasingly devoting their production to higher-margin AI servers, which means the few chips they can make that go into other products have gotten much more expensive.
Nonetheless, Amazon may be criticised for the move, considering that it makes the bulk of its revenue on Fire TV devices from ads rather than the initial sale.
The move suggests that the days of being able to bring streaming smarts to any old TV at ultra-low cost are rapidly coming to an end. Of the major players in the streaming device industry, only Google, which makes the Google TV Streamer, and Nvidia, which makes the aging Nvidia Shield, have yet to hike their prices. But with Amazon following in the footsteps of Apple and Roku, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before those holdouts follow suit. After all, they have shareholders to please, even if they could theoretically absorb the RAM price increases themselves.
In the U.S., Walmart is also a major streaming player with its affordable Onn streaming sticks, but it has also recently upped its prices, with some devices now costing a staggering 100% more than they did earlier this year.
