Feeling bad for the “plus” sign that Apple TV shed earlier this week? Well, good news: that abandoned word now has a new home, thanks to Amazon.
Starting today, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K is now called the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus—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 plus-sized features; instead, we’re simply talking 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 unveiled during its big fall hardware event late last month.
The $39.99 Fire TV Stick 4K Select sits on 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 $59.99 Fire TV Stick Max, which offers Wi-Fi 6e support (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 customizable Alexa widgets, the ability to turn your TV screen into a photo frame, and “dynamic art” that changes according to the ambient light in the room, the current weather, and the time of day.
There are also a couple of 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 for streaming services and devices have been something of a thing over the past few months. This past summer, HBO Max got its old name back (it was briefly rebranded as “Max,”) while Paramount+ shaved the “with Showtime” branding off some of its subscription tiers.
Just on Monday, Apple announced that its Apple TV+ streaming service will 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.
