I have always been unhappy with Roku's decision to get involved in streaming content at all, because it could potentially cut into their service-agnostic architecture. Bad enough in my mind that they had in-platform ads instead of just charging for hardware, but way worse when they are actively competing with streaming services.
And now it looks like it has happened -- a large content provider wants to buy the company, and while I hope that they can at least notionally continue to be service-agnostic, the temptation to cheat to favor your own services will always be there an when cost cutting and belt tightening is on the table, that is surely what will happen.
[1] My order for the "Netflix Player by Roku": "CustomerID# 1162 Thank you very much for your Roku order. Your order number is 2472, placed 5/20/2008 at 10:01AM."
AFAIK, Netflix by Castagnait was abandoned more than a year ago, and most of the others are supported by an anonymous shady guy that uses a proxy. And you can only get 720p at best.
What if parent already knows the answers to that and the question they really want to ask is … wait for it… the one they actually asked?
If you want to ask a different question go right ahead but cutting off others like this is plain rude.
We seem to have an economic cycle of enshittification => piracy => people realizing they've over enshittified => goto 10. We were in phase 3 a few years ago, now we're in phase 1 and it's an insane race to the bottom.
As I recall, it was originally a Netflix product that was spun out due to its potential to cause a conflict of interest in their main business. They didn't want devices like Chromecast and AppleTV to see Netflix as a competitor, and be reluctant to bundle the Netflix streaming app on their devices.
At best, you should use services on a temporary basis and never allow yourself to get entrenched. Once you're locked in, you are part of the product to be sold to advertisers. The "install base" that is used as leverage for these sorts of shenanigans.
My email search:
"Welcome to the "Roku-tech" mailing list" ... "Tue, Dec 2, 2003, 10:48 AM"
Not sure how I ended up on the mailing list a month before their product was released. There must've been buzz about it for a few months before release.
Roku at least felt non-evil or non-evil adjacent in its notional neutrality.
The Nvidia shield used to be a decent streaming box?
shield is still competitive. It has become a little laggy but apparently that can be fixed by swapping out the launcher.
I'll also echo my general disappointment with the direction of these devices. A decade ago, they were one of the best streaming devices you could buy.
then a couple years back it was "there's a new discover tab, filled with ads! Don't you love it?"
then it was "not enough people are viewing the discover tab, so we're merging the discover tab with the home tab! Don't you love it?"
---
They're still decent hardware for a streaming device (although somewhat dated at this point), but now you have to go out of your way to make the software not shitty.
Removing the stock launcher helps a lot, but requires ADB access. (easy enough, and [insert llm of choice] can both generate a minimal replacement launcher and install it for you for about $10 worth of tokens, so technical users are fine, but I can't really recommend them to non-technical family anymore.)
Not "just". You left out its role as a bot network exit node.
It's ultimately utterly destructive, of course. Wish I had a good solution.
Now you're making it sound even more interesting. What is the name of this device?
- Too many promos of other shows before watching a show. This is often for shows I've already watched and am watching. Apple knows which shows I watch. It shouldn't need to give me promos for shows I've watched or am actively watching. - Poor UX for "Play Next Episode" functionality. If I just finished an episode of a show and I click to watch the next episode, I don't need to see the recap of the previous episode or the intro. - Speaking of intro, when you click to skip, it usually leaves you somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds from the end of the into, not actually after it.
Infuse is a better Plex app than Plex is; and it supports Jellyfin and a bunch of other data sources.
It is, IMHO, a platonic ideal of what a “tv-shaped” video player app should be.
Ideally, this would be designed in two parts: separate the file structure from the metadata discovery mechanism.
I personally want a file structure managed by the OS. Let me make folders and nested subfolders to whatever structure I prefer.
Then make the metadata discovery slightly more manual. Click a media file, click a hypothetical "add metadata" button, and then a simple search box with "is this your movie?" and click apply to import metadata from a search result. easy peasy.
The UI is clearly meant to resemble a typical media app but falls short if the end user prefers, for example, foobar2000's UI.
not even a mute button. and it makes me earn for the old directtv remote! that's how bad it is. Everything is so unresponsive and odd.
I like that it’s aluminum, doesn’t take batteries, and is bluetooth (or at least doesn’t require line of site). It’s the longest lasting of any remote in my house.
You’re probably thinking of earlier versions that were different.
Amazing they got $22B and tivo must be really kicking itself.
The hardware on the top tier devices doesn't seem to keep up. Interacting with it is slower and more laggy than it originally was.
They've tried to keep them unobtrusive, which I appreciate, but the mere existence of ads is disappointing. I almost give the Roku City ads a pass, because frankly that's clever, and mirrors the real world enough that it seems logical to me -- but ads in menus is grating.
CEC has been super flaky with the latest revisions as well, so for the past couple of weeks I've been relegated to using either the Roku remote or my phone instead of my TV's remote.
I'm a big fan of waiting to see before prejudging, but I can't imagine anything gets better post-acquisition, and I was already on my way out the door. I guess I'm buying an Apple TV now? Are there any other recommendations? I haven't kept up with the space at all, so if anyone has suggestions I am super happy to receive them.
The last time I used Apple TV I was disappointed, and since they are a streaming provider themselves I expect this to get worse rather than better. Even very basic UI things like "what block in the UI is the cursor currently selected" are painful, and the navigation flow mirrors the navigation flow of the Apple TV app on Roku, which is already pretty bad -- navigating the a series page from a single episode is a tortuous multi-step process that involves getting the incantations exactly right or being reverted back to the main screen and losing all context.
The moat here is mostly just having widespread and maintained support for streaming services, which is a question of scale; that's why so many "Smart" TVs get stale after a year or so while Roku stays fresh. In 2008 I paid (in 2008 dollars) $99 for the Roku. The price now is much lower but I would probably be willing to pay that amount for a fresh device that is performant and agnostic to streaming services and no ads (including those remote buttons) and has a straightforward UI.
I guess I’ll just randomly press the arrow buttons until I notice which box is getting slightly larger.
But yes, I would be thrilled to just pay $250-300 for a hardware device that just did quickly did what it was supposed to do and didn't look too ugly in doing it.
I mean, of course they did. If you were running a company and had to choose between a one-time relatively small fee vs a life time of near constant ad driven income per user, which would you choose?
In the end the tradeoff is pretty rough; judging by alternatives, keeping the cost of the stick low requires that they do the ad thing. I say that I would pay more for an ad-free version but I never went out there and bought the nvidia shield for example even though I'm told it's a good experience.
I'm a weird person in that I'm not anti-ads, but I am anti-adTech. Commercials on OTA broadcasts are good times to get up and get a refill, go to the restroom, are just hit the mute button. The days of DVRs were glorious as well as you could just fast forward through the ad breaks. Streaming platforms are the absolute best thing that ever happened to adTech. They cannot be skipped. That guarantees to the ad buyer that they will get their air time which helps adTech push ad buy rates.
The money made from advertising is not to be dismissed. It can be very significant to bottom lines, just ask Vizio* where they make more money on data than they do from the hardware sold used to collect that data.
*https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver...
I have never seen a mergre like this not lead to anything but a money grab. They will no doubt remove things like PlutoTV, which is free, and substitutte it with more subscription apps and more data collection
But I fear this need means this time is ending, and we'll only be left with crap.
Furthermore, I'm on a Roku looking for content and the ads highlight content. It's not that different than seeing posters on the way to a movie theater.
We have antitrust laws in the US but they do us absolutely no good when the government refuses to even consider enforcing them, which seems to be the case in the past few decades.
As if the will of the people is what matters... Only if those people are backed by money does matter. I don't agree with that, but that's the world we live in.
An extensive study [0], showed "Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it"
They studied actual attitudes about issues, moneyed attitudes, and tracked what got implemented as laws. NONE of the 'thinking, protesting, commenting, of demanding' was effective. MONEY was.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
Had cable TV constantly contacting me, since I had them for internet, until one day. Asked them, "Does this include Fox News" ... "Yes" ... "I'll will end my life before ever supporting Fox News. Contact me again when I can get À la carte and I don't have to fund the trash at Fox News." They never contacted me again.
Only streaming service I ever paid for was SiriusXM. Canceled it when I found that Fox News was part of the package.
There is already so much content to consume in a day that I don't have to sit in front of a TV for an hour or two. HTPC from my ripped DVDs and Blu-rays goes a long way if I too.
I called them to get it set up, and when I suggested the internet dude on the line kept trying to upsell me TV packages. I was polite at first but eventually I said something like "listen, I don't want your 'Movie Lovers' package. I don't want your 'Sports Fan' package. I don't want your 'Family Entertainment' package. I don't want your 'Comedy Lover' package. I just want internet. I do not want anything but internet. If you pitch more more packages I will still only want internet".
Admittedly a little rude, but the guy did get the point after that and he was perfectly helpful getting everything set up.
Subjecting a Filipino call center operator who is just doing her job to such melodramatic threats is not the flex you think it is.
FWIW I canceled my SiriusXM like a year ago and it wasn't too hard. Just a web form.
People in real life are multi-facet not singularly polar. People with agendas and grifters are polar. Polarization is also for those that want to be self-defined by a party.
I also do not support news or other agencies that reject STEMM or use questions to mask direct lying.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168530 lol. Just lol.
I'm not surprised they're going this route, and would not be surprised if News becomes a drastically smaller piece of Fox over the coming years.
They haven't been platform agnostic for a while now. Swapping out one streaming owner for another really isn't going to move the needle much.
At this point it does seem easier to not have to look up if something is NewsCorp Fox or the parts of Fox that Disney bought because Disney no longer calls them Fox.
The commenter asked a question and it was answered. I don't think your hostile reply was needed.
Ohhh, trust us, we know. You've made 10 trolling comments in the past 30 minutes with a 2 day old acct
I had been a pretty big Roku fan before that point as I had worked with them back in ~2017 and knew how locked down and sewn up they kept customer data, and only shared it in a very anonymized way. Obviously the situation has degraded in the recent years, and caused me to brick the functionality of a very expensive device.
Seems like it’s impossible to have a smart tv now that actually respects privacy, so back to dumb tvs and connections to pcs?
People usually suggest commercial TV’s but its not clear how to determine which have comparable HDR gamut as consumer units. So it’s hard to figure out exactly what the premium is.
Is a $2,000 dumb/commercial TV equivalent to a $500 consumer TV or a $1600 one?
Before Roku I spent 2005-2018 on various TiVo systems including whole house with minis and the cable-card system. Was thinking of quitting that for awhile, but the Rovi/Macrovision acquisition was definitely the writing on the wall.
Guess it's time to try an Apple TV as it seems like the only semi-premium option available.
- Fox PR: https://www.foxcorporation.com/news/corp-press-releases/2026...
- Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-buy-roku-...
Went to a friend's house and he had a Roku Express player and his was littered with ads and the whole UI was Christmas themed.
Moral of the story is pihole is OP.
Fun fact, Roku sells security cameras at Walmart, they're technically rebranded Wyze cameras (look just like them, same hardware) with Roku software on them. If you did buy one of those Roku cameras, maybe a good time to switch off to Wyze if you don't like this direction.
Is that even possible? IIRC Wyze cameras are whatever cheap Chinese OEM model thy find and can brand the firmware for. Seems as likely that Roku went to same OEM source.
That's odd since they've been around for 23 years. I would understand that stance 20 years ago.