Streaming sticks used to be a really good purchase that was pretty straightforward. You paid the cost, which changed over time, plugged it in, and watched your shows. The same devices now boot into ad-heavy home screens, autoplay sponsored trailers before you've touched a button, and push updates that make the interface worse on purpose. You technically own the hardware, but the experience is designed around someone else's revenue. Building your own box used to sound like overkill, but not anymore now that an option like Fire TV is bad for home labs.
Streaming sticks got worse on purpose
The home screen is mostly ads now
Streaming devices used to be these neutral little boxes you bought once, and that was it. Today, the hardware itself is sold at a loss, and the real money is in ads and data. It's great for the companies, but not very good for the users.
Roku, for instance, lost over $80 million on device sales in 2024 but pulled in nearly $2 billion in profit from its platform side, which is mostly ads. Amazon does the same thing with Fire TV. The company sells the stick cheaply, then brings it back through ads and purchases in the interface.
That's why that $30 device you thought you owned keeps getting updated to shove more sponsored stuff in your face. And then even the premium services on top of that start adding ads or raising prices for the…