This Amazon Fire TV Stick is getting a random name change
Feeling bad about the plus sign Apple TV lost earlier this week? Well, good news: This abandoned word now has a new home, thanks to Amazon.
Starting today, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K is now called Fire TV Stick 4K More— not the exact “+” that the Apple TV streaming service removed, but it’s close enough.
In a statement to TechHive, Amazon was careful to note that the Fire Stick 4K Plus doesn’t come with any new or larger features; instead, we’re just talking about a new name, nothing more.
The reason for the (somewhat random) name change is to “help customers differentiate between” the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus and the new Fire TV Stick 4K Select, which Amazon revealed during its big fall hardware event late last month.
The $39.99 Fire TV Stick 4K Select sits at the lower end of Amazon’s three Fire TV 4K sticks, while the $49.99 Fire TV 4K Plus takes the Select’s features (including 4K HDR output) and adds Dolby Vision HDR as well as Dolby Atmos audio.
Then there’s the high-end Fire TV Stick Max at $59.99, which offers support for Wi-Fi 6e (versus Wi-Fi 5 and 6 for the Fire TV Stick Select and Plus, respectively), 16GB of storage (double the storage of the other two sticks), and the Fire TV Ambient Experience, which serves up customizable Alexa widgets, the ability to transform your screen’s screen TV into a picture frame and “dynamic art” that changes depending on the ambient light in the room, the current weather and the time of day.
There are also a few other Fire TV players: the Fire TV Stick HD ($34.99), which doesn’t do 4K streaming, and the Fire TV Cube ($139.99), a larger, cube-sized streaming player that can control TV components with voice commands.
Name changes to streaming services and devices have been commonplace over the past few months. Last summer, HBO Max returned to its old name (it was briefly rebranded as “Max”), while Paramount+ removed the “with Showtime” branding from some of its subscription tiers.
Last Monday, Apple announced that its Apple TV+ streaming service would now be called simply “Apple TV,” similar (some would say too similar) to its Apple TV 4K streaming box.
This story is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best streaming media players.
