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It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible. For those who don't know: 1. The

It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible. For those who don't know: 1. The only public development API requires the use of their proprietary language BrightScript which is poorly documented, and for which no official compiler, interpreter, or runtime environment is available. Enthusiasts had to create an interpreter for it (https://github.com/sjbarag/brs https://github.com/sjbarag/brs) to speed up development time. Previously you had to push your app to a Roku to run it before you could learn of any syntax errors. 2. They do have a C/C++ API, but they limit access to big orgs and require an NDA to use it. There are plenty of cool projects, like a Prince of Persia port (https://github.com/lvcabral/Prince-of-Persia-Roku https://github.com/lvcabral/Prince-of-Persia-Roku). That they are finally shoring up their poor developer ecosystem with C/C++ and JavaScript APIs is great, but it's unfortunate that they aren't allowing these apps to be distributed through their official store.

josteink 5y ago
> It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible. Step 1: be a cheap (the cheapest?) option in the early phase of a market. This way you build up a sizeable customer-base using a market-segment with low/no expectations. Step 2: app-developers will be forced to support your platform, despite low-quality platform, ecosystem or SDK if they want to be “everywhere”. Step 3: With better/more popular apps supporting your platform you can start making more expensive devices or even sell/rent your platform to other players needing a checkbox to check before they can launch (ie smart-TVs). Roku is really crap to use, but by playing by this book they’ve seemingly done well (as a business) so far.
- tssva 5y ago
  "Roku is really crap to use" I have used Google TV, Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku. I have used Roku both as a separate device and built into a TV. Out of them all I prefer to use the Roku. I even sold an Apple TV which was given to me and used part of the sale to replace it with a Roku Premiere+ which I found to be a much better experience.
  - lighthazard 5y ago
    Apple TV's touch remote is a travesty. Their UI is equally annoying when you realize they advertise the Apple stuff first, and you have to click Home again to get to your main apps. Compare any of them to Roku, and Roku is a barebones, works as expected, channel choosing device.
    - afavour 5y ago
      > touch remote is a travesty > you have to click Home again to get to your main apps Both of these are changeable via settings (if you’re talking about the current generation remote, if the old one an Apple TV can be trained to use any other remote). I have a bunch of Roku devices and an Apple TV and typically prefer the Apple TV: the apps are of higher quality, Airplay is a great added feature and most importantly: no ads. Roku used to have barely any but they’re adding more and more and it’s getting obnoxious.
      - tssva 5y ago
        My experience with Apple TV was that Apple advertised their own apps regularly. Also most Roku devices released in the last couple of years including Roku TVs support Airplay.
        afavour 5y ago
        Where did you see these ads? I see no ads at all on my Apple TV so I’m curious.
        CharlesW 5y ago
        I'm confused by this too, and prefer Apple TV because it doesn't display ads. In my experience Roku does continue to display "special" ads, even if you turn off all user-controllable options. I think parent commenters are referring to how the Apple TV app — which is great, but can be avoided by using the Home screen — aggregates all available content, and has a dedicated Apple TV+ tab. In other words, the Apple TV app is also the Apple TV+ app.
- spinax 5y ago
  > Roku is really crap to use I disagree, I find the Roku experience to be quite easy to use and it does what I want with no surprises in the UX.
  - jinto36 5y ago
    I think they might have meant "crap to develop for"?
  - derefr 5y ago
    “Easy” and “enjoyable” are different things. The Roku UI is extremely slow/jittery (even on the fastest models) and the layout of their software keyboard, in combination with the design of their remote (and/or smart TV remotes), makes entering text take an eternity as well. (And their voice support isn’t good enough to rely on in place of it.) When a Roku is just sitting there doing its thing, it’s fine; but when you have to get it to do something else, it’s like a line at the DMV.
    - aksss 5y ago
      I think the software keyboard is a per app design, which is either a ding or a bonus (dev flexibility). Regardless, if you have to spend time typing/searching, using remote on phone is best, where you can use the phone’s keyboard.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  I think the Roku Ultra is a great product, can't speak to the other levels, but it works really well in comparison to google's parade of stuff, amazon fire stick, apple tv, and smart tv apps on Samsung, LG, and Sony TVs. Also the remote finder is quite handy. For me, the best aspect of it was their openness. All of the other competing products had their own streaming services, which meant problems with the other providers- why they spun this off from Netflix in the first place. This means the search will go across the different services to answer the pressing question of the day- which service is this content on and at what price? I was considering starting a company to offer this service until Roku met my need there. Now though, the battle with Google over YouTube has me suspicious of this status. The temptation to chase recurring revenue streams is quite high.
- LightG 5y ago
  I have Roku spread across our entire renovated house including an outbuilding. Rock solid. 4 devices. Teamed up with Plex, and has been a fantastic experience so far (1 year and counting). Simple. Solid. Works. Nothing but praise from my side. Literally, thank Gawd, as native TV smart apps are an absolute waste of time (they might as well retire them all now) and I don't want to get sucked into the other ecosystems.
- addicted 5y ago
  Roku basically benefitted from 2 things: 1) The constant battles between Apple, Google, Amazon, where removing or not adding their specific media distribution channel to each others platforms was used as leverage in all sorts of unrelated negotiations. This meant that Roku was for the longest time the only device that supported AppleTV, Google, Prime Video. 2) Google’s insistence on it having a physical remote for their Chromecast players which in itself was likely a result of the fiefdoms which led to Chromecast and Google TV being separate products for the longest time. Both of these things are not true anymore. Roku is no longer a neutral platform. And Google Chromecast now comes with a remote. I see very little reason to pick a Roku over the Chromecast with Google TV and I suspect that Roku’s disadvantages will only worsen with v2 of the Google device.
ForHackernews 5y ago
That's disappointing for sure, but it's worth remembering how TINY Roku is compared to its competitors: Amazon: about 1,300,000 employees Google: about 135,000 employees Roku: about 2,000 employees Maybe they just don't have the resources to support a rich third-party dev ecosystem
- arcturus17 5y ago
  Which perhaps reinforces the idea that they should have leaned on open-source instead of proprietary tech?
  - dubcanada 5y ago
    Roku was a sign company, they made digital sign software. They just converted their existing setup to TV video streaming. Why redo everything?
  - capableweb 5y ago
    If anything, their track record seems to reinforce the opposite idea. Their company is tiny but has a 37% market share according to previous comment, all while having a shitty and closed down developer ecosystem. I'm generally pro-open source, so this is not coming from a place of shooting down open source, I'm just reading the context in this thread.
    - anyfactor 5y ago
      To me Roku seems like they are trying to modernize the TV cable industry rather than revolutionize it. They are following a different business model than most modern tech companies.
      - xattt 5y ago
        Wikipedia has a history of carriage disputes between the company and other companies. Sure, the recent Google spat could have been a one-off thing, but they seem to have an issue with a lot of folks. My personal experience is that when one individual has a bunch of problems with a number of others, it is probably the one individual that’s the problem.
sjbarag 5y ago
> Enthusiasts had to create an interpreter for it (https://github.com/sjbarag/brs https://github.com/sjbarag/brs) to speed up development time. Author of that interpreter here - didn't expect to wake up to that repo appearing in a top HN comment! That started as a side project and was maintained with a few coworkers during spare work hours (thanks, Hulu!) for the past 3 years, along with a unit testing framework that runs in it (https://github.com/hulu/roca https://github.com/hulu/roca). I'm happy to answer any "developing for Roku" questions that come up :)

josteink 5y ago

> It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible. Step 1: be a cheap (the cheapest?) option in the early phase of a market. This way you build up a sizeable customer-base using a market-segment with low/no expectations. Step 2: app-developers will be forced to support your platform, despite low-quality platform, ecosystem or SDK if they want to be “everywhere”. Step 3: With better/more popular apps supporting your platform you can start making more expensive devices or even sell/rent your platform to other players needing a checkbox to check before they can launch (ie smart-TVs). Roku is really crap to use, but by playing by this book they’ve seemingly done well (as a business) so far.

tssva 5y ago
"Roku is really crap to use" I have used Google TV, Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku. I have used Roku both as a separate device and built into a TV. Out of them all I prefer to use the Roku. I even sold an Apple TV which was given to me and used part of the sale to replace it with a Roku Premiere+ which I found to be a much better experience.
- lighthazard 5y ago
  Apple TV's touch remote is a travesty. Their UI is equally annoying when you realize they advertise the Apple stuff first, and you have to click Home again to get to your main apps. Compare any of them to Roku, and Roku is a barebones, works as expected, channel choosing device.
  - afavour 5y ago
    > touch remote is a travesty > you have to click Home again to get to your main apps Both of these are changeable via settings (if you’re talking about the current generation remote, if the old one an Apple TV can be trained to use any other remote). I have a bunch of Roku devices and an Apple TV and typically prefer the Apple TV: the apps are of higher quality, Airplay is a great added feature and most importantly: no ads. Roku used to have barely any but they’re adding more and more and it’s getting obnoxious.
    - tssva 5y ago
      My experience with Apple TV was that Apple advertised their own apps regularly. Also most Roku devices released in the last couple of years including Roku TVs support Airplay.
      - afavour 5y ago
        Where did you see these ads? I see no ads at all on my Apple TV so I’m curious.
        CharlesW 5y ago
        I'm confused by this too, and prefer Apple TV because it doesn't display ads. In my experience Roku does continue to display "special" ads, even if you turn off all user-controllable options. I think parent commenters are referring to how the Apple TV app — which is great, but can be avoided by using the Home screen — aggregates all available content, and has a dedicated Apple TV+ tab. In other words, the Apple TV app is also the Apple TV+ app.
spinax 5y ago
> Roku is really crap to use I disagree, I find the Roku experience to be quite easy to use and it does what I want with no surprises in the UX.
- jinto36 5y ago
  I think they might have meant "crap to develop for"?
- derefr 5y ago
  “Easy” and “enjoyable” are different things. The Roku UI is extremely slow/jittery (even on the fastest models) and the layout of their software keyboard, in combination with the design of their remote (and/or smart TV remotes), makes entering text take an eternity as well. (And their voice support isn’t good enough to rely on in place of it.) When a Roku is just sitting there doing its thing, it’s fine; but when you have to get it to do something else, it’s like a line at the DMV.
  - aksss 5y ago
    I think the software keyboard is a per app design, which is either a ding or a bonus (dev flexibility). Regardless, if you have to spend time typing/searching, using remote on phone is best, where you can use the phone’s keyboard.
mattmcknight 5y ago
I think the Roku Ultra is a great product, can't speak to the other levels, but it works really well in comparison to google's parade of stuff, amazon fire stick, apple tv, and smart tv apps on Samsung, LG, and Sony TVs. Also the remote finder is quite handy. For me, the best aspect of it was their openness. All of the other competing products had their own streaming services, which meant problems with the other providers- why they spun this off from Netflix in the first place. This means the search will go across the different services to answer the pressing question of the day- which service is this content on and at what price? I was considering starting a company to offer this service until Roku met my need there. Now though, the battle with Google over YouTube has me suspicious of this status. The temptation to chase recurring revenue streams is quite high.
LightG 5y ago
I have Roku spread across our entire renovated house including an outbuilding. Rock solid. 4 devices. Teamed up with Plex, and has been a fantastic experience so far (1 year and counting). Simple. Solid. Works. Nothing but praise from my side. Literally, thank Gawd, as native TV smart apps are an absolute waste of time (they might as well retire them all now) and I don't want to get sucked into the other ecosystems.
addicted 5y ago
Roku basically benefitted from 2 things: 1) The constant battles between Apple, Google, Amazon, where removing or not adding their specific media distribution channel to each others platforms was used as leverage in all sorts of unrelated negotiations. This meant that Roku was for the longest time the only device that supported AppleTV, Google, Prime Video. 2) Google’s insistence on it having a physical remote for their Chromecast players which in itself was likely a result of the fiefdoms which led to Chromecast and Google TV being separate products for the longest time. Both of these things are not true anymore. Roku is no longer a neutral platform. And Google Chromecast now comes with a remote. I see very little reason to pick a Roku over the Chromecast with Google TV and I suspect that Roku’s disadvantages will only worsen with v2 of the Google device.

ForHackernews 5y ago

That's disappointing for sure, but it's worth remembering how TINY Roku is compared to its competitors: Amazon: about 1,300,000 employees Google: about 135,000 employees Roku: about 2,000 employees Maybe they just don't have the resources to support a rich third-party dev ecosystem

arcturus17 5y ago
Which perhaps reinforces the idea that they should have leaned on open-source instead of proprietary tech?
- dubcanada 5y ago
  Roku was a sign company, they made digital sign software. They just converted their existing setup to TV video streaming. Why redo everything?
- capableweb 5y ago
  If anything, their track record seems to reinforce the opposite idea. Their company is tiny but has a 37% market share according to previous comment, all while having a shitty and closed down developer ecosystem. I'm generally pro-open source, so this is not coming from a place of shooting down open source, I'm just reading the context in this thread.
  - anyfactor 5y ago
    To me Roku seems like they are trying to modernize the TV cable industry rather than revolutionize it. They are following a different business model than most modern tech companies.
    - xattt 5y ago
      Wikipedia has a history of carriage disputes between the company and other companies. Sure, the recent Google spat could have been a one-off thing, but they seem to have an issue with a lot of folks. My personal experience is that when one individual has a bunch of problems with a number of others, it is probably the one individual that’s the problem.

sjbarag 5y ago

> Enthusiasts had to create an interpreter for it (https://github.com/sjbarag/brs https://github.com/sjbarag/brs) to speed up development time. Author of that interpreter here - didn't expect to wake up to that repo appearing in a top HN comment! That started as a side project and was maintained with a few coworkers during spare work hours (thanks, Hulu!) for the past 3 years, along with a unit testing framework that runs in it (https://github.com/hulu/roca https://github.com/hulu/roca). I'm happy to answer any "developing for Roku" questions that come up :)