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HBO Max was delayed in appearing on Roku because of negotiation breakdowns. In the case HBO it was Roku that seemed to have the demands. They are looking at rev

HBO Max was delayed in appearing on Roku because of negotiation breakdowns. In the case HBO it was Roku that seemed to have the demands. They are looking at revenue anywhere they can, but if their position weakens look for Google, ATT, and others to simply forgo working with them. I think Roku is in a perilous position in general. They generated a lot of buzz on Wallstreet with their high user counts. They also purchased a DSP to get more into the advertising game. However they are at risk of being disrupted. They do not offer much that is unique and have largely gained and held market position by being the cheapest and easiest to use. Cheap Android TV devices are starting to compete with them on price and tv manufacturers have mostly chosen to create and maintain their own ecosystems. Unless they make some big strategic maneuvers I see them slowly being squeezed out like Tivo.

BeetleB 6y ago
I think we probably hang out in different crowds. I have a Chromecast, and various consoles. Roku is still the best overall (despite shortcomings). Everyone I know who bought a Roku prefers it to all the other options. Can anyone tell me what other streaming devices have over Roku? What I need: - A real remote. Not going to use my phone to control things. - Good search. When I search, I want results from most of the apps - so I can find out which ones have the show/movie I'm looking for (with an indication of price). - Good support from all the major services: Youtube, PBS, Plex, Netflix, all the major TV channels (HGTV, ABC, CBS, etc). - Easy to install my own app without militant control from the manufacturer. - Affordable ($25-35), and not integrated into my TV. - Can use in hotels/motels - this is critical (Roku generally wins big here - Chromecast totally fails).
- pa7ch 6y ago
  I think OP had the answer. Android TV beats its because you don't think about buying a Roku when your TV comes with something equivalent.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    That's no use for people who don't have it (i.e. everyone I know). Those that do have smart TVs use Rokus, but that may be because their TVs are older (likely not Android). And in any case, it doesn't check all the boxes - particularly the one about "use in motels/hotels when I travel"
- disillusioned 6y ago
  The new Chromecast with Google TV, despite being stupidly named, ticks basically every single box here, except that it's $50, instead of $25-$35, but it's _fantastic_. The remote is great, and includes a Google Assistant voice search button that's super useful, and the search is federated in the way you describe, and very good. It has support from every service, but it integrates really well with YouTubeTV, obviously, which is nice because there's a great Live tab with a guide. You can run the app store and install whatever Android TV app you want: I've installed NordVPN on mine to get around NHL.TV blackout bullshit. AND it will get around a captive portal because it has a remote/browser, so you can use it in a hotel. Honestly, it's a delightful little device.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I use AndroidTV via an nVidia Shield TV box. My TV actually has Android, but due to multiple problems that resulted in me having to reset my TV to factory and set everything up again, I went back to my older nVidia Shield. We now have the Shield on both TVs in the house, and they both work great. With all the Android phones out there, nobody is going to skip Android as a device when launching their service. (Unlike Roku, which is a decision they have to make.) They also tend to update their apps a lot more often, so you always end up with the latest bugfixes and improvements. And the number of users guarantees that bugs get reported and fixed. It doesn't fit your "affordable" point, though. We're talking $200, not $30. I've had mine quite a few years, though, and it's been well worth it.
JeremyNT 6y ago
> HBO Max was delayed in appearing on Roku because of negotiation breakdowns. In the case HBO it was Roku that seemed to have the demands. They are looking at revenue anywhere they can, but if their position weakens look for Google, ATT, and others to simply forgo working with them. That's when I ditched Roku. Android devices are cheap enough and arguably a little better. Roku really has no lock-in - their entire value proposition is "you can stream the services you want on this cheap device." Nobody buys Roku because of the "Roku ecosystem" or "network effects" or anything else - they just buy it because it's cheap and (supposedly) works. When it stops working - and it doesn't matter why - it's easily replaced.
ksec 6y ago
DSP = Demand-side platform, I had to google it because I thought it was Digital Signal Processing.
NationalPark 6y ago
And the HBO Smart TV app is still not available natively on LG televisions, which obviously isn't a big deal to people who already have a media system set up but is annoying none the less. All this streaming stuff sure is starting to feel like the cable television plans I grew up with.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Radarr, sonarr, and plex are a nice escape hatch for availability. Similarly, an HDMI cable connected to a PC with a browser is a working fall-back to most missing apps on any platform.
dyingkneepad 6y ago
Well, there are also Roku TVs now.
- Cd00d 6y ago
  I recently bought a TCL TV with a Roku OS. I think it's great. It was cheap. I'm a fan of Roku (been with them since 2008 or so). I'm disappointed to see these tiffs with content companies. Remember the time when every video you wanted to play on your computer required a different software player? Are these companies planning on re-doing all that with hardware? "Oh, I have a Roku for most things, then plug in Apple TV for Apple+, I use the Fire stick for Prime Video, and the Chromecast allows me to watch YouTube TV! I just needed a TV with 17 HDMI ports!"
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Well, I'm already forced to use my Raspberry Pi for H265 (which it cannot play fullscreen for some reason), because my TV doesn't support it.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    AppleTV+ is everywhere - including on Roku.
sircastor 6y ago
The reason I picked and stay with Roku is that they aren't married to a single Big Tech co. I already suffer the lack of a proper YouTube app on my Echo Show because Amazon and Google are having a tiff. I don't want to pick an ecosystem and live exclusively inside of it. As it is, I'm already in a mixed household (Me with iOS and my wife with Android) and it's a pain to deal with the lack of cross-platform playing together.
- FriedrichN 6y ago
  This whole thing where you have to sacrifice everything to big corps and buy new devices every year makes me not want to bother consuming any media at all to be honest. When I see people wrestle with all kinds of devices, services, and subscriptions I just get sad and start thinking if the juice is actually worth the squeeze and coming to the conclusion it really isn't.
  - tnzm 6y ago
    So much this. Sadly, you and I are exceptions - caring about it only enough to voice our disregard for it. Usually, by the time a person is old enough to not need the churn of mass culture to be relevant to their peers, they're usually hooked on some brand or other of high-quality spam. Unlike street drugs, mass media rots your brain with full societal approval. This is nothing new of course - many writers, musicians, and filmmakers of the 20th century have expounded on the soul-crushing effects of commercialized culture. As expected, they have ended up being more obscure to the general public than the ones who embraced it. It was weird seeing for the first time a mainstream artist or work that risked to be slightly more original than the industry average (in order to reach a previously uncaptured audience segment) being lauded as some sort of genius, while its subject matter was the same old "hey you, yes you, buy a bigger TV!" Allocating resources and incentives (economy) and collectively deciding what's valuable and worth incentivizing (culture) are two separate layers of the social "stack". Advertising couples them in the worst possible way, effecting a positive feedback loop of wastage. The possibility that the emergent adtech hivemind's ultimate purpose is to measure and hone the efficiency of this mass pacification strategy is Orwellian par excellence. My answer to this? Just enough economic productivity to afford unabashed dirtbaggery on the cultural plane. Anyone who does not share this perspective is watching a different movie.
cdiddy2 6y ago
I use roku simply because its not connected to a big tech company. Same reason I use spotify. I wonder how many others there are like me
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > Same reason I use spotify I think it's pretty safe to call Spotify a big tech company at this point
  - panopticon 6y ago
    It's a weird world where a company that does billions in annual revenue isn't considered big.
    - modo_mario 6y ago
      It's big but it's tied to a single service as opposed to being some huge conglomerate like microsoft or google that has it's hands into dozens of markets.
    - hnra 6y ago
      I think a lot of people use the phrase "big tech" to refer to the giants whom use lobbying, monopoly power, etc. to stay disproportionately big.
      - rocqua 6y ago
        Spotify is starting to do this with podcasts.
        girvo 6y ago
        Though their UI really needs some work in my opinion for it to be worth it. I subscribed specifically to listen to their exclusive podcasts, but bounced off and cancelled a month later due to it being a honestly not great experience. It's possible that my expectations don't match the wider worlds though: my girlfriend loves Spotify and uses it for podcasts as well as music. For me, music requires album-focused UI, and I honestly prefer having Podcasts broken out into it's own app or interface. Mixing the two just didn't feel right.
eitally 6y ago
I use Roku [for my outdoor projector] simply because it was 1. cheap, and 2. has the fullest support for various VOD providers. The delayed launch of HBO Max was a bit irritating, but they did have Disney+, which at the time was missing from Samsung's native app store. I don't care about YTTV at all, though, becasue I don't want any live tv, period.
discardable_dan 6y ago
Why is it that my only ad-free TV option is a Raspberry Pi?
- rocqua 6y ago
  I have never seen adds on my LG tv, or atleast never noticed them. I am at LGs mercy for updates though, so it still isn't ideal. And yet, with PLEX and a backup hdmi cable, it works pretty dang well
joncp 6y ago
> They also purchased a DSP to get more into the advertising game They needed to buy a digital signal processor to do advertising? That sounds odd. Can you elaborate?
- tyoh 6y ago
  DSP in this case is a demand side platform, it's an ad tech term.
rurp 6y ago
I have both a Roku and a Chromecast and the Roku works _much_ better. The Chromecast used to be fine, but a few years ago they refactored it in the Home app and now it constantly needs to be reconnected to the wifi. That would be annoying enough but the setup process also fails regularly. No other device in my house has this problem.
- latortuga 6y ago
  I have used: - a Roku - the newest "Chromecast with Google TV" - old style chromecasts - an "smart TV" with Android TV - A "smart TV" from visio The worst by far are the smart TVs. The old chromecast is next because there's no UI outside my phone, but I always have my phone so it's not that bad. Next is the Roku and finally, top marks for the CCGTV. It's super fast and responsive and I love it.
  - mastazi 6y ago
    My experience with the Chromecast with Google TV is that many apps that are available on other platforms are missing on Google TV / Android TV - one example would be NHK World (the English language service from the Japanese NHK TV) and another example is Flo Sports (a sports streaming app). For this reason I'm thinking of getting a Fire TV or an Apple TV where those missing apps are available. When I purchased the Google TV device I was under the impression that Android TV was one of the major platform on the market, but later I found out that in terms of apps choice, it's not the best. Also, it's puzzling that some apps are available for Amazon's Fire TV but not for Google TV / Android TV - both are based on Android so I thought it would be very easy to make an app available to both platforms - maybe there are some technical aspects that I'm missing.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    CCGTV is so, so buggy. I have to restart it constantly because: - Sound won't play - Subtitles stop working - Some app specific issue (there's no way to kill an app that I know of)
- Severian 6y ago
  Same with my old school Chromecast audio, it needs to be rebooted constantly as it too somehow stops connecting to wifi. I used to use it with a toslink cable and got really good sound out of it using a DLNA server from my storage. Now I just use my TV (as a monitor) optical out since it is connected via ethernet. I can still use DLNA on it as well to play my music.
awa 6y ago
Roku has tie up with TV manufacturers like TCL too. That's where a lot of their growth is coming in. Personally, I have switched to Fire-Stick and Chromecast with Google TV from Roku because the Roku interface hasn't evolved in the past few years and they are also pushing ads and their own channels now.
- randomdude402 6y ago
  I recently managed to get my hands on a non-smart TV and bought a roku stand alone device for it. Mostly because the interface is simple and has been the same for years. I prefer the moving fast and breaking things to stay away from our limited TV time.
mdoms 6y ago
After all this time Roku still does not sell units in my country and I suspect they barely have a presence outside North America. Not really a surprise that companies who refuse to sell products to diverse markets fail to keep their revenue safe.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  This is a big short coming for Roku, they not only have three or four European language options only, but developers have to actually spend time coding UTF8 support. So far the only apps that I use that don't show Japanese as squares or worse blanks is the Apple airplay app (which shipped initially without support) and the YouTube app. It's a frustrating experience using Plex with properly named shows, but atleast burning in subtitles gives support while watching.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    What does Roku require of app developers to support UTF8? Honestly wondering because it seems so bizarre that they would make it more difficult than any other app platform.
mikeryan 6y ago
TV manufacturers have mostly chosen to create and maintain their own ecosystems. This is actually a declining trend. LG and Samsung do but Moore's law has gotten it to a point where Android TV and, in fact Roku's platform are becoming much more prevalent on TVs, particularly some of the newer lower end devices. There's a large cost to maintaining your own HTML based platform (which is what most 3rd parties are) and the HTML platforms pretty radically under-perform these days. Android TV could win but much like the US cable operators the large CE providers aren't too excited about getting so closely tied to Google. Roku's continued independence is cool in a space where there is so much consolidation, and attractive to some CE manufacturers.
- BikiniPrince 6y ago
  It’s too bad Android Tv application quality is atrocious. Applications like Hulu have huge swaths of the library that simply won’t play and it crashes. Couple this with a lack of application support and it is quite disappointing. The pled support was the last straw which led me to attach a roku to the television.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    In my experience, poor/incomplete applications are something you have to keep an eye out for regardless of what platform you're dealing with. I've seen audio stutter on a smart TV running the Netflix streaming app, and similar stutter on a network-enabled Blu-Ray player running the Amazon Video streaming app. I've seen 4K playback cause occasional stuttering in the Amazon Video app on a smart TV. Disney+ group playback is currently unsupported on PS4, but is supported on Xbox One. A few years ago, the PS3 Netflix app supported 1080p, whereas the Xbox 360 Netflix app only supported 720p. I've also seen the Xbox One YouTube app insist on playing a video at 720p or lower, despite that Roku will play it at 1080p (perhaps an issue with only a certain codec being available at that quality?). I've seen a paid video service with an iPhone app with completely broken Chromecast support (they fixed it a few weeks after I filed a bug report).
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  > There's a large cost to maintaining your own HTML based platform (which is what most 3rd parties are) and the HTML platforms pretty radically under-perform these days. I'm struggling to understand the claim made by this statement. Maybe I missed something? What does HTML have to do with serving video over the wire? Underperforming on which metrics? What's the time value of "these days"?
thayne 6y ago
What is (mostly) unique about Roku, and one of the main reasons I went with a Roku is that it isn't made by the same company as one of the big streaming services, and is therefore less likely to privlege that service. If they start giving special privileges to youtube, then Roku just becomes a third party Android TV device.
- jolux 6y ago
  Apple TV isn't made by a big streaming service either.
  - thayne 6y ago
    Apple has iTunes. And I don't have a single apple device in my house, so interoperability would be problem. Not to mention that Apple TV is significantly more expensive.
    - jolux 6y ago
      Apple TV doesn't really privilege the iTunes store in any way though.
hedora 6y ago
They have 38% market share on new TV’s sold, and that’s not including the standalone players. Also, they just announced a YoY doubling of advertising revenue. Their low end device is $30, and provides a best of class (but HD) experience. I don’t really see how they can realistically be undercut on price, unless competitors started paying people to use their devices. Do you want to deal with a janky streaming device for the next 5 years, or just shell out the cost of a pizza and six pack? If anything, they’ll be attacked from the high end. Are you willing to pay an extra $100-200 for a non-ad-subsidized streaming device?
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  I am always willing to pay extra to get rid of ads.

BeetleB 6y ago

I think we probably hang out in different crowds. I have a Chromecast, and various consoles. Roku is still the best overall (despite shortcomings). Everyone I know who bought a Roku prefers it to all the other options. Can anyone tell me what other streaming devices have over Roku? What I need: - A real remote. Not going to use my phone to control things. - Good search. When I search, I want results from most of the apps - so I can find out which ones have the show/movie I'm looking for (with an indication of price). - Good support from all the major services: Youtube, PBS, Plex, Netflix, all the major TV channels (HGTV, ABC, CBS, etc). - Easy to install my own app without militant control from the manufacturer. - Affordable ($25-35), and not integrated into my TV. - Can use in hotels/motels - this is critical (Roku generally wins big here - Chromecast totally fails).

pa7ch 6y ago
I think OP had the answer. Android TV beats its because you don't think about buying a Roku when your TV comes with something equivalent.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  That's no use for people who don't have it (i.e. everyone I know). Those that do have smart TVs use Rokus, but that may be because their TVs are older (likely not Android). And in any case, it doesn't check all the boxes - particularly the one about "use in motels/hotels when I travel"
disillusioned 6y ago
The new Chromecast with Google TV, despite being stupidly named, ticks basically every single box here, except that it's $50, instead of $25-$35, but it's _fantastic_. The remote is great, and includes a Google Assistant voice search button that's super useful, and the search is federated in the way you describe, and very good. It has support from every service, but it integrates really well with YouTubeTV, obviously, which is nice because there's a great Live tab with a guide. You can run the app store and install whatever Android TV app you want: I've installed NordVPN on mine to get around NHL.TV blackout bullshit. AND it will get around a captive portal because it has a remote/browser, so you can use it in a hotel. Honestly, it's a delightful little device.
wccrawford 6y ago
I use AndroidTV via an nVidia Shield TV box. My TV actually has Android, but due to multiple problems that resulted in me having to reset my TV to factory and set everything up again, I went back to my older nVidia Shield. We now have the Shield on both TVs in the house, and they both work great. With all the Android phones out there, nobody is going to skip Android as a device when launching their service. (Unlike Roku, which is a decision they have to make.) They also tend to update their apps a lot more often, so you always end up with the latest bugfixes and improvements. And the number of users guarantees that bugs get reported and fixed. It doesn't fit your "affordable" point, though. We're talking $200, not $30. I've had mine quite a few years, though, and it's been well worth it.

JeremyNT 6y ago

> HBO Max was delayed in appearing on Roku because of negotiation breakdowns. In the case HBO it was Roku that seemed to have the demands. They are looking at revenue anywhere they can, but if their position weakens look for Google, ATT, and others to simply forgo working with them. That's when I ditched Roku. Android devices are cheap enough and arguably a little better. Roku really has no lock-in - their entire value proposition is "you can stream the services you want on this cheap device." Nobody buys Roku because of the "Roku ecosystem" or "network effects" or anything else - they just buy it because it's cheap and (supposedly) works. When it stops working - and it doesn't matter why - it's easily replaced.

ksec 6y ago

DSP = Demand-side platform, I had to google it because I thought it was Digital Signal Processing.

NationalPark 6y ago

And the HBO Smart TV app is still not available natively on LG televisions, which obviously isn't a big deal to people who already have a media system set up but is annoying none the less. All this streaming stuff sure is starting to feel like the cable television plans I grew up with.

rocqua 6y ago
Radarr, sonarr, and plex are a nice escape hatch for availability. Similarly, an HDMI cable connected to a PC with a browser is a working fall-back to most missing apps on any platform.

dyingkneepad 6y ago

Well, there are also Roku TVs now.

Cd00d 6y ago
I recently bought a TCL TV with a Roku OS. I think it's great. It was cheap. I'm a fan of Roku (been with them since 2008 or so). I'm disappointed to see these tiffs with content companies. Remember the time when every video you wanted to play on your computer required a different software player? Are these companies planning on re-doing all that with hardware? "Oh, I have a Roku for most things, then plug in Apple TV for Apple+, I use the Fire stick for Prime Video, and the Chromecast allows me to watch YouTube TV! I just needed a TV with 17 HDMI ports!"
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Well, I'm already forced to use my Raspberry Pi for H265 (which it cannot play fullscreen for some reason), because my TV doesn't support it.
- scarface74 6y ago
  AppleTV+ is everywhere - including on Roku.

sircastor 6y ago

The reason I picked and stay with Roku is that they aren't married to a single Big Tech co. I already suffer the lack of a proper YouTube app on my Echo Show because Amazon and Google are having a tiff. I don't want to pick an ecosystem and live exclusively inside of it. As it is, I'm already in a mixed household (Me with iOS and my wife with Android) and it's a pain to deal with the lack of cross-platform playing together.

FriedrichN 6y ago
This whole thing where you have to sacrifice everything to big corps and buy new devices every year makes me not want to bother consuming any media at all to be honest. When I see people wrestle with all kinds of devices, services, and subscriptions I just get sad and start thinking if the juice is actually worth the squeeze and coming to the conclusion it really isn't.
- tnzm 6y ago
  So much this. Sadly, you and I are exceptions - caring about it only enough to voice our disregard for it. Usually, by the time a person is old enough to not need the churn of mass culture to be relevant to their peers, they're usually hooked on some brand or other of high-quality spam. Unlike street drugs, mass media rots your brain with full societal approval. This is nothing new of course - many writers, musicians, and filmmakers of the 20th century have expounded on the soul-crushing effects of commercialized culture. As expected, they have ended up being more obscure to the general public than the ones who embraced it. It was weird seeing for the first time a mainstream artist or work that risked to be slightly more original than the industry average (in order to reach a previously uncaptured audience segment) being lauded as some sort of genius, while its subject matter was the same old "hey you, yes you, buy a bigger TV!" Allocating resources and incentives (economy) and collectively deciding what's valuable and worth incentivizing (culture) are two separate layers of the social "stack". Advertising couples them in the worst possible way, effecting a positive feedback loop of wastage. The possibility that the emergent adtech hivemind's ultimate purpose is to measure and hone the efficiency of this mass pacification strategy is Orwellian par excellence. My answer to this? Just enough economic productivity to afford unabashed dirtbaggery on the cultural plane. Anyone who does not share this perspective is watching a different movie.

cdiddy2 6y ago

I use roku simply because its not connected to a big tech company. Same reason I use spotify. I wonder how many others there are like me

jedimastert 6y ago
> Same reason I use spotify I think it's pretty safe to call Spotify a big tech company at this point
- panopticon 6y ago
  It's a weird world where a company that does billions in annual revenue isn't considered big.
  - modo_mario 6y ago
    It's big but it's tied to a single service as opposed to being some huge conglomerate like microsoft or google that has it's hands into dozens of markets.
  - hnra 6y ago
    I think a lot of people use the phrase "big tech" to refer to the giants whom use lobbying, monopoly power, etc. to stay disproportionately big.
    - rocqua 6y ago
      Spotify is starting to do this with podcasts.
      - girvo 6y ago
        Though their UI really needs some work in my opinion for it to be worth it. I subscribed specifically to listen to their exclusive podcasts, but bounced off and cancelled a month later due to it being a honestly not great experience. It's possible that my expectations don't match the wider worlds though: my girlfriend loves Spotify and uses it for podcasts as well as music. For me, music requires album-focused UI, and I honestly prefer having Podcasts broken out into it's own app or interface. Mixing the two just didn't feel right.

eitally 6y ago

I use Roku [for my outdoor projector] simply because it was 1. cheap, and 2. has the fullest support for various VOD providers. The delayed launch of HBO Max was a bit irritating, but they did have Disney+, which at the time was missing from Samsung's native app store. I don't care about YTTV at all, though, becasue I don't want any live tv, period.

discardable_dan 6y ago

Why is it that my only ad-free TV option is a Raspberry Pi?

rocqua 6y ago
I have never seen adds on my LG tv, or atleast never noticed them. I am at LGs mercy for updates though, so it still isn't ideal. And yet, with PLEX and a backup hdmi cable, it works pretty dang well

joncp 6y ago

> They also purchased a DSP to get more into the advertising game They needed to buy a digital signal processor to do advertising? That sounds odd. Can you elaborate?

tyoh 6y ago
DSP in this case is a demand side platform, it's an ad tech term.

rurp 6y ago

I have both a Roku and a Chromecast and the Roku works _much_ better. The Chromecast used to be fine, but a few years ago they refactored it in the Home app and now it constantly needs to be reconnected to the wifi. That would be annoying enough but the setup process also fails regularly. No other device in my house has this problem.

latortuga 6y ago
I have used: - a Roku - the newest "Chromecast with Google TV" - old style chromecasts - an "smart TV" with Android TV - A "smart TV" from visio The worst by far are the smart TVs. The old chromecast is next because there's no UI outside my phone, but I always have my phone so it's not that bad. Next is the Roku and finally, top marks for the CCGTV. It's super fast and responsive and I love it.
- mastazi 6y ago
  My experience with the Chromecast with Google TV is that many apps that are available on other platforms are missing on Google TV / Android TV - one example would be NHK World (the English language service from the Japanese NHK TV) and another example is Flo Sports (a sports streaming app). For this reason I'm thinking of getting a Fire TV or an Apple TV where those missing apps are available. When I purchased the Google TV device I was under the impression that Android TV was one of the major platform on the market, but later I found out that in terms of apps choice, it's not the best. Also, it's puzzling that some apps are available for Amazon's Fire TV but not for Google TV / Android TV - both are based on Android so I thought it would be very easy to make an app available to both platforms - maybe there are some technical aspects that I'm missing.
- thebean11 6y ago
  CCGTV is so, so buggy. I have to restart it constantly because: - Sound won't play - Subtitles stop working - Some app specific issue (there's no way to kill an app that I know of)
Severian 6y ago
Same with my old school Chromecast audio, it needs to be rebooted constantly as it too somehow stops connecting to wifi. I used to use it with a toslink cable and got really good sound out of it using a DLNA server from my storage. Now I just use my TV (as a monitor) optical out since it is connected via ethernet. I can still use DLNA on it as well to play my music.

awa 6y ago

Roku has tie up with TV manufacturers like TCL too. That's where a lot of their growth is coming in. Personally, I have switched to Fire-Stick and Chromecast with Google TV from Roku because the Roku interface hasn't evolved in the past few years and they are also pushing ads and their own channels now.

randomdude402 6y ago
I recently managed to get my hands on a non-smart TV and bought a roku stand alone device for it. Mostly because the interface is simple and has been the same for years. I prefer the moving fast and breaking things to stay away from our limited TV time.

mdoms 6y ago

After all this time Roku still does not sell units in my country and I suspect they barely have a presence outside North America. Not really a surprise that companies who refuse to sell products to diverse markets fail to keep their revenue safe.

Larrikin 6y ago
This is a big short coming for Roku, they not only have three or four European language options only, but developers have to actually spend time coding UTF8 support. So far the only apps that I use that don't show Japanese as squares or worse blanks is the Apple airplay app (which shipped initially without support) and the YouTube app. It's a frustrating experience using Plex with properly named shows, but atleast burning in subtitles gives support while watching.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  What does Roku require of app developers to support UTF8? Honestly wondering because it seems so bizarre that they would make it more difficult than any other app platform.

mikeryan 6y ago

TV manufacturers have mostly chosen to create and maintain their own ecosystems. This is actually a declining trend. LG and Samsung do but Moore's law has gotten it to a point where Android TV and, in fact Roku's platform are becoming much more prevalent on TVs, particularly some of the newer lower end devices. There's a large cost to maintaining your own HTML based platform (which is what most 3rd parties are) and the HTML platforms pretty radically under-perform these days. Android TV could win but much like the US cable operators the large CE providers aren't too excited about getting so closely tied to Google. Roku's continued independence is cool in a space where there is so much consolidation, and attractive to some CE manufacturers.

BikiniPrince 6y ago
It’s too bad Android Tv application quality is atrocious. Applications like Hulu have huge swaths of the library that simply won’t play and it crashes. Couple this with a lack of application support and it is quite disappointing. The pled support was the last straw which led me to attach a roku to the television.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  In my experience, poor/incomplete applications are something you have to keep an eye out for regardless of what platform you're dealing with. I've seen audio stutter on a smart TV running the Netflix streaming app, and similar stutter on a network-enabled Blu-Ray player running the Amazon Video streaming app. I've seen 4K playback cause occasional stuttering in the Amazon Video app on a smart TV. Disney+ group playback is currently unsupported on PS4, but is supported on Xbox One. A few years ago, the PS3 Netflix app supported 1080p, whereas the Xbox 360 Netflix app only supported 720p. I've also seen the Xbox One YouTube app insist on playing a video at 720p or lower, despite that Roku will play it at 1080p (perhaps an issue with only a certain codec being available at that quality?). I've seen a paid video service with an iPhone app with completely broken Chromecast support (they fixed it a few weeks after I filed a bug report).
vagrantJin 6y ago
> There's a large cost to maintaining your own HTML based platform (which is what most 3rd parties are) and the HTML platforms pretty radically under-perform these days. I'm struggling to understand the claim made by this statement. Maybe I missed something? What does HTML have to do with serving video over the wire? Underperforming on which metrics? What's the time value of "these days"?

thayne 6y ago

What is (mostly) unique about Roku, and one of the main reasons I went with a Roku is that it isn't made by the same company as one of the big streaming services, and is therefore less likely to privlege that service. If they start giving special privileges to youtube, then Roku just becomes a third party Android TV device.

jolux 6y ago
Apple TV isn't made by a big streaming service either.
- thayne 6y ago
  Apple has iTunes. And I don't have a single apple device in my house, so interoperability would be problem. Not to mention that Apple TV is significantly more expensive.
  - jolux 6y ago
    Apple TV doesn't really privilege the iTunes store in any way though.

hedora 6y ago

They have 38% market share on new TV’s sold, and that’s not including the standalone players. Also, they just announced a YoY doubling of advertising revenue. Their low end device is $30, and provides a best of class (but HD) experience. I don’t really see how they can realistically be undercut on price, unless competitors started paying people to use their devices. Do you want to deal with a janky streaming device for the next 5 years, or just shell out the cost of a pizza and six pack? If anything, they’ll be attacked from the high end. Are you willing to pay an extra $100-200 for a non-ad-subsidized streaming device?

warkdarrior 6y ago
I am always willing to pay extra to get rid of ads.