Weekly rewind
Amazon Prime’s price hike: Starting May 11 for new subscribers, and June 16 for existing ones, Amazon Prime’s annual price will rise from $99 to $119 per year. This is the second time Amazon has raised the price of Prime, which had $79 per year until the last increase in 2014. The company points to the rising costs of its free delivery and digital media services, and argues that the value of Prime has increased as the company expands those services. (Incidentally, Amazon also announced this week that it’s renewed a deal with the NFL to stream 11 Thursday Night Football games for Prime members.)
We probably should have seen this price hike incoming in January, when Amazon raised the monthly price from $10.99 to $12.99 per month. You can still sign up for Prime Video by itself for $9 per month, though this will only save you $12 per year compared to a full Prime membership.
Tablo Dual Lite review: Over at TechHive, I reviewed Nuvyyo’s Tablo Dual Lite DVR and declared it the best product for most people in our over-the-air DVR roundup. At $140, the Dual Lite is cheaper than most other options even after you factor in a mandatory external hard drive. It’s also fairly easy to set up and can stream to all kinds of devices in and out of the house, versus just one television like Tivo’s Roamio OTA.
Power users will still want to stay away, though. Like Tablo’s other networked DVRs, the Dual Lite doesn’t support surround sound or full broadcast TV quality, and it’s unable to provide 60 frames per second video on 480i or 1080i channels. It also won’t let you stack multiple Tablo units together and manage them as one DVR, and there’s no way to browse the channel guide while live TV plays in the background. My sense is that most users will accept these trade-offs in exchange for an otherwise versatile products that pretty much just works. Over-the-air DVR is hard, and no one’s perfected it yet.
New Roku features: Next month, Roku will add live news to The Roku Channel, its free source of ad-supported movies and TV shows that first launched last September. Sources will include ABC News (which will stream 24-7 news programming for the first time), celebrity and pop culture from PeopleTV, and the up-and-coming streaming news service Cheddar. The channel will also get curated movie collections and a handy “Continue Watching” option.
The new features will arrive as part of Roku OS 8.1, which focuses on bug fixes but has one handy feature: Private headphone listening will support multiple users at a time through their smartphones.
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