In 2023, almost all TV streaming boxes suck, turning into ever-cheaper, ad-supported commodity items and failing to surpass smart TVs, themselves hardly great
There are no good streaming boxes, and I blame everybody. … Streaming boxes had so much potential.
Context & Ripple Effects
The streaming box began the decade as a premium product — back in 2015, reviewers still crowned Apple TV and Fire TV as genuinely differentiated players — but the intervening years stripped away every reason to buy one. Smart TVs ship with adequate built-in apps, and the money moved from hardware margins to advertising and subscription economics.
That shift is now explicit on both sides of the screen: Reed Hastings laid out Netflix's pivot to cheaper, ad-supported plans as far back as 2022, Pluto co-founder Ilya Pozin's Telly is giving away 500K 4K TVs whose second screen exists purely for ads, and the top US streaming basket is heading toward $87 per month this fall — above the average $83 cable package. The box is no longer where the value lives.
First-order effects
- Box makers are competing on price and ad load instead of capability, which means Apple, Google, Roku, and Amazon are all selling into a market where the smart TV already provides the interface for free.
- Services chasing ad revenue — Netflix among them — now treat cheap or free screens as distribution, so the box becomes a loss leader or ad vehicle rather than a profit center.
Second-order effects
- Aggregators see an opening where boxes failed: Comcast has pursued exactly this with its broadband-only home hub that aggregates Netflix and Prime apps, betting that control of the entry point matters more than owning the hardware.
- As the streaming basket outprices cable at $87/month, pay-TV incumbents regain a pricing argument they lost years ago, pressuring streamers to discount via ad tiers and bundles.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, living-room economics fully invert: value accrues to whoever controls the default UI and the ad inventory on it, echoing the open-access fight over the set-top box that Tom Wheeler's FCC plan started in 2016.
- Hardware differentiation in the living room structurally disappears — devices converge into either built-in TV software or operator-provided hubs, leaving third-party boxes a niche for enthusiasts.
The trend: Living-room hardware is collapsing into a commodity layer whose real business is ad monetization and app-shelf control, not the device itself.