As a long-time[1] customer of Roku I am tentatively extremely pessimistic.
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."
Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Of course, Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs chock full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.
The only issue with Apple TV is they still can't figure out a good remote. I feel like I need to hold my breath and be very intentional with my swipes so when I'm e.g. swiping up/down to get to a menu where I can turn on subtitles I don't accidentally swipe left or right, sending me scrubbing 17 minutes forward.
Either touch is a bad input mechanism for controlling your TV, or Apple hasn't figured it out.
> I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there
It definitely is.
IMO the only advantage of the Nvidia Shield is better HDMI audio passthrough but it has so many other issues. And with more recent versions of the Plex client for tvOS the lack of audio passthrough is much less of an issue than it used to be (PCM conversion used to introduce sync issues). Also the Plex app for Android TV has been getting consistently worse over the years for me. Plus all the ads Android TV added a couple of years ago. Ugh.
Some of the more exotic boxes out there to run CoreELEC have tehcnically better DV support. These might work if you only want a Plex or Kodi client but for general streaming the Apple TV is just better.
Honestly can't wait for Apple to release a new one. Hopefully with audio passthrough of more codecs.
A few reasons I'm staying positive towards Apple, despite being a streamer themselves, is that they're not large at all. They've currently remained a small, niche content provider of reasonably high-quality content. They don't seem to have the aspirations to be bigger than those on their platform. Also, they have so much increasing oversight on their App Store and decisions there, that they likely do not want to do anything that shows a preference and gains the ire of governing agencies. I'm hoping this keep them relatively neutral.
Despite becoming quite critical of Apple in many other areas, I agree with your assessment here. And hopefully they realize if they started getting so anticompetitive in this space that they start elbowing "non-Apple" streamers out of the picture on their platform, the loss would be Apple's. A streaming box that doesn't have Netflix, or that is missing another major, would be far less compelling than what it is today.
If the box where I can’t set up a third party player to do the ‘replay last 5 seconds with subtitles on’ because it’s all locked down is the best then I don’t want to know what the worst is, I’ll just keep using LibreElec. At least if LibreElec does something I don’t like Claude can fix it.
The Apple TV (hardware) can do what you're asking using a voice command "What did he/she say". It's possible it no longer works in every app because services insist on writing their own players that don't work as well as the player provided by Apple TV.
> I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.
Sure I guess. But those devices objectively suck. the CPU and storage in "smart TVs" are so underpowered that using streaming apps on them is painfully sluggish.
For comparison, I've used the "Chromecast with Google TV" (a $50ish at its release 4k streaming stick that uses the 'Google TV', fka 'Android TV' platform) and a Sony TV on the same platform, released the same year. The Sony UI is a lot more sluggish than the Google stick device. Also tested running an SNES emulator. The Google device can easily do it, the Sony TV can't keep up even on a basic game like Super Mario World.
And then of course, on the other end of the spectrum, the Apple TV exists, which specs-wise can easily play 3D racing games at a fine framerate.
With Roku built in as well as whatever ad pipeline(s) the TV manufacturer wants. These days my AppleTV is allowed to talk to the internet. My television is not.
Eh those TVs are a dubious value proposition. I grabbed one and wound up returning it because it won't even let you use the TV as a damned TV without connecting it to the internet and creating a roku account so they can track you.
Some apps on the apple tv still have ads on the pause screen (covering the content I may have wanted to pause to see, a terrible UX choice). It can't be entirely avoided.
It can if you avoid a dedicated device and just hook a desktop up to your TV. It's a one time cost to set up a host you control and that seems to be getting more and more worth it.
Is there a solution for audio and video downscaling when accessing content via the browser in a linux htpc setup?
I don't think any of the big streaming content providers have native apps on linux and no browser can pass through audio bitstreams to HDMI. Video quality is limited as well.
Having a dedicated streaming box is better in this regard
Yep, Apple TV has long been my preferred streaming box. I put one on every TV and don't connect the TV to the network. Plex and YouTube are probably my top apps and while YouTube is maddening (just horrible UI/UX), I find Plex to be mostly enjoyable or at least reliable and unsurprising.
Unironically, the best streaming box out there is a PC where you can hook up ad block and stream content from independent content providers like Dropout and Nebula using their web-based UI.
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.
Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.
> Roku's decision to get involved in streaming content at all
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.
Services are really never safe. Or at best, they should be considered temporary. If you like what they provide, know that what they provide could become worse and/or more expensive. This is the likeliest scenario.
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.
Recently got a Google Smart TV for the first time, instead of Roku, and I hate it so much. Roku interestingly I think folded in ads in the most non-obtrusive way (except for the full screen ads which I think were quickly abandoned). But Google Smart TV is a completely intentional bid for sticky integration that fosters Google dependence (google login, google telemetry tracking what you watch inside of other apps, other streamers are google apps), which is not how I want to experience my streaming. It's also slow and sometimes glitchy. I had never had a TV capable of crashing before.
Roku at least felt non-evil or non-evil adjacent in its notional neutrality.
Google and Apple seem like the best competition and they do have streaming services, although Google's is just their bad YouTube tv thing and very ignorable. I'm not sure Amazon is even in the running now.
The Nvidia shield used to be a decent streaming box?
They (ETA nvidia shield) added ads many years ago. Really left a bitter taste in my mouth after paying for an ad-free "premium" device to have them shoved out there.
horsawlarway is correct regarding the nvidia shield. I'm not sure how much is nvidia, and how much is google in the "they". I kinda blame nvidia more than google (if I bought a google device I would expect google ads as part of the purchase), but it's hard for me to say. "they" the people who actually own the streaming device (nvidia shield) I "purchased" updated the software and added a lot of ads.
The ads showed up when the launcher got a major redesign, and the Google TV (or whatever they call it this week) launcher is a Google product. I seem to remember that nVidia delayed shipping the new enshittified version for quite a long time, so I'm pretty confident Google gets the blame here.
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.)
Are there solid existing launchers that can be swapped in? Changing the launcher is one of the first things I do when I get a new Pixel phone and highly recommend it, but I don't really want to have to maintain a vibe coded one.
I've used Projectivy for years on every Google TV stick I own (Google/Onn). Works perfectly with full customization/zero ads on the free version and has built in workaround to take over the Home navigation to bypass the built-in launcher without ADB or rooting. I chip-in for the premium version to help out the dev since I get so much value out of it but the freemium features are mostly just cosmetic and the free version has everything you need.
At this point if I'm dealing with that level of hassle I'm much happier running linux on a computer. The value add of these devices was plug and play, and if it's not that why bother.
ADB is rarely actually a requirement unless you really want to do it the "right" way and fully remove the launcher.
I always use a custom launcher (Projectivy) on my Google TV devices, lately typically the $20 Onn stick and intercept the Home navigation to open the launcher either using the option built into Projectivy or with a free app from the Play Store/Fdroid.
Takes <5 minutes to setup everything once and then I basically forget the native Google TV launcher exists. Pretty much unbeatable value for a $20 ad-free Jellyfin/Plex/Kodi/Stremio setup. YMMV with different models but I also had no issues remapping the remote buttons from Netflix/etc to my own apps (including the "Free TV" button to launch Stremio which I always enjoy).
Also (somewhat ironically) the best smart TV OS to look for on cheap/subsidized TVs is built-in Google TV. Since they can easily be configured as 100% "dumb" on startup without any ads/nags/etc (it's the first question you're asked). The TV never hits Wifi to update and the remote/menus just do normal TV stuff without any "smart" features. Otherwise, it's luck of the draw how miserable/impossible the manufacturer makes avoiding Wifi/updates.
(Or you could do the same process installing the custom launcher on the TV's built-in Googe TV, but then you're at the mercy of the CPU/RAM the OEM included in BoM some # of years ago and lose the clean seperation between dumb TV/replaceable stick).
$20 Onn stick + $199 "smart" Google TV in dumb mode goes really far these days for a locally hosted setup without ads/annoyances.
Look into the TiVo Stream 4K. It’s an Android box but has been very reliable for me. Tivo does force some quirks so I used ADB to disable core services and the default launcher has ads so I switched to Projectivy launcher.
You can go to Walmart and buy a streaming box that is a Raspberry pi-sized board with custom Android installed and the package claims it has 700+ channels. But it just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites.
Ah, the choice content providers made a few years back that put us all in this situation to begin with - throw constant ads at us for marginal revenue.
That's the spirit of the age here in America, no? When so many of our leading public figures are hyper-wealthy individuals who are where they're via various sorts of shuffling costs onto others and pocketing profits, is it any surprise when the public seeks to do the same?
It's ultimately utterly destructive, of course. Wish I had a good solution.
Not really. Apple TV seems to be the closest ive found to not being riddled with ads though. the home screen doesn't have ads at all, the closest which exists is the "top shelf" feature when you hover over the Apple TV app, and that can be turned off in settings. But it has some other issues
I do a lot of my streaming with Apple TV, but the worst parts about the Apple TV app are in my opinion are:
- 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.
I'm pretty happy with AppleTV except for the walled garden. I want to run Kodi. I do run it via XCode and a dev account but because of the app restrictions it's a 2nd class experience. Looked for alternatives like Jellyfin but the only ones on the app store all appear to spy on what you view.
I'm not totally tracking what you're saying, Jellyfin isn't exactly Kodi, it's more like Plex, and Jellyfin does have an app in beta for AppleTV but the best way (arguably) to experience Jellyfin, Emby or possibly even Plex on any Apple product is the Infuse app.
Jellyfin's worst aspect is the opinionated file structure. You have to set up folders the way it wants, and then the resulting UI browser is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Pretty sure it's done this way for automated metadata discovery.
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.
I really like the remote. It has mute and volume and like swiping on the top rather than clicking.
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.
I have been reading these threads where people are patching firmware with AI. I am wondering if there is a way to fix some of the privacy issues on Roku tvs given this deal.
"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.
Well, color me impressed -- my understanding was that Roku was formed as a spinoff from Netflix around the release of their first streaming player. This is sort of confirmed by the Roku wikipedia article, which does not, for example, mention the HD1000 at all!
I guess Wood founded Roku but it was basically semi-defunct when we went to work for Netflix, and then the "spinoff" was basically letting Wood poach his team from Netflix over to his existing company to staff up and sell the first streaming device.
I was also super-early Roku customer, but frankly I have been mostly disappointed with Roku for the past year or so.
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 lagginess is a puzzle to me; one big selling point of the Roku (vs. e.g. the Amazon Fire Stick) is that it is so much more responsive, but newer models have been getting worse instead of better.
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.
Thanks for the response. As a lifetime Plex passer, I am inured to having to re-learn the navigation UI with every new release, so that part can't be too bad.
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.
Roku hasn't been 'agnostic' since RokuTV or the Roku Channel, or whatever-the-fuck it's called. I watch with a GoogleTV device, connected to my Roku television through HDMI. A few months ago I started seeing these weird popups, saying something like, "I see you're watching 'The Goonies'. Why not watch on RokuTV?" It was bizarre, and a little creepy considering I wasn't using the Roku platform at all. As it turned out, Roku added a 'feature' for doing content recommendations. I disabled that 'feature', but it was still weird, like, "These guys are watching what I'm watching, even when I'm not on their platform!"
Smart TVs are always monitoring what you’re watching by taking screenshots and processing them. This is a known thing for at least several years now. The only safe way to use a smart TV is to never connect it to the network, and use another streaming device. That separate device will spy on you too, but at least you’re making the choice.
> Bad enough in my mind that they had in-platform ads instead of just charging for hardware
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?
Obviously preferences vary, but I would prefer to accumulate the goodwill rather than the ad fees. I'm not a saint and I would probably try to have some sort of "buy the roku streamer v7, now with <some new feature that I don't backport>".
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.
You have to realize that you are not in the same financial situation as the vast majority of people (based on the hoity-toity nature that HN readers are all well paid). The vast majority of people just accept ads as part of life and do not care one bit about the evils of the adTech world. If they are able to get a service essentially for free or at least a significant discount, they don't mind ads. Most people don't even notice them. If an ad free paid for service was the only option, I'd suggest that a lot of the user numbers would drop.
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.
A lot of average people will also pirate if it's cheap and the UI is good. There was a pretty brisk business selling cheap hacked firetv sticks to people for that
The problem with the companies run by people who want to accumulate goodwill is that they will always be outcompeted by companies run by shithead assholes making number go up, because empirical evidence is that not enough consumers give a shit about goodwill to make it a real competitive advantage.
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
Begin? I haven’t heard anything positive about Roku in 10 years or so. They had to race to the bottom to compete with Amazon and Google. And maybe they mostly survived til now, but all I hear is complaints about ads.
Nah. I have a Roku 3 stick and a brand-new $700 projector with Google TV. The Roku 3 is light-years ahead in terms of speed and UI ergonomics over the Google machine. And both are better than the smart TVs I've used.
But I fear this need means this time is ending, and we'll only be left with crap.
I think the complaint about ads is mostly a knee-jerk reaction by certain online communities. The ads are not particularly obnoxious - they are always off to the side and don't interfere in navigation in any way.
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.
On my Roku the ads aren't just off to the side. When I go to the home screen there are now "recommended" shows above and below my channels, and they are initially selected, so I have to scroll down past them to get to my actual channels.
my household and extended family has been running on roku for literally over a decade, in multiple countries, and not one person has complained. all of us, myself included, are perfectly happy with it
I’d be shocked if the Jellyfin App survives this. Plex probably will, as a for-profit company it has the war chest to buy placement/attention/app approval. But i prefer jellyfin because it doesnt try to sell me anything or tell me what to watch.
There is the long standing problem that if you build a road for others, and others get unfathomably rich using that road, you end up looking pretty dumb.
I may be lambasted for saying this, but I do not believe that Fox (or any large media company, really) should be permitted to purchase direct access to the TV hardware of roughly 30-50% of american households.
Much in the same way that the company selling tickets and taking a percentage of all ticket resales shouldn't also own the venues which can then force artists to use a specific ticketing provider, thus creating a monopoly.
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.
Your reasoning does not stand at all. There are plenty of things that the majority of people agree upon in this country but it does not get done for a variety of reasons. For example, it's not as important as other issues so they can't prioritize it for voting, gerrymandering, etc...
It literally does? Things that people care strongly about get prioritized. I said others don't feel like the OP. Maybe they agree with the point if presented with the choice, but again, they don't feel the same way, so they don't think, protest, comment, demand it in the way the OP does.
Not at all. I can feel very strongly about that, but if I feel more strongly about health care so tens of thousands of people don't die needlessly and countless millions more don't go bankrupt or get maimed from lack treatment, one is going to win over the other. That doesn't mean I don't feel strongly about it. Also, the 600,000 in Wyoming get the same two senators as the 40,000,000 people in California so it's not like there is equal representation by any means.
More accurately, they adwquately don't give politicians the money and exercise the power of wealth.
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.
As someone who has canceled all my subscriptions and just uses Jellyfin for 100% of my content, what are some good options besides a Roku?
I would love to have hardware like Roku, but just run a jellyfin client, with no need to even have Internet, just access to my jellyfin server on my local network.
It would need to be family approved as I don't need another project. I am not interested in AppleTV or a Google device (unless it can be 100% degoogled).
Has anyone ever successfully gotten things like CoreELEC/LibreELEC to work well?
I wish jellyfin would just sell some hardware, preloaded with a great jellyfin client. I'd pay a premium for it to help fund software development.
I have never paid for any cable TV or video streaming service in my life. Reason is simple, I don't want to financially support people / shows / stations that go against my personal standards of human decency.
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.
When I got my house, I needed to set up internet, and Verizon FIOS was what I went for.
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.
I'm sure they're forced to do that and graded on how many upgrades they sell. Their bosses will even listen on calls and if they don't make all those pitches, they'll get written up or fired. Source: seen it first-person.
Yeah, I wasn't really upset with the guy for reading his script. I'm sure he was doing what he was trained to do. I figured that if I gave the little diatribe then I kind of figured that he wouldn't get in trouble for just moving on.
I'm impressed that you were able to cancel SiriusXM. I thought that it was set up to cling to people for life, and possibly continue billing their estate after death.
I don't see politics as left and right. To me they are in the shape of a Radar chart or Radial Column chart or Sunburst diagram.
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.
If you are saying that being against giving FOX News money is some wild example of the left-wing equivalent to the extreme right-wing extremism... You might want to take the clown paint off and reconsider.
Actually, a more likely button might be "Sports" which would either open your preferred sports app (smarter way to do it) and default to Fox Sports, or a "Stream TV" type button that opens up Tubi which is already run by Fox, and surprisingly had decent content on it.
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.
Why would this be more likely? The current remotes already have a Netflix button, a Hulu button, a Sling button and a Disney+ button. Roku sells dedicated buttons on their remotes to the highest bidder.
Back when we had things like Dish and cable, I was able to put a "Parental Block" on channels. I used this to hide or remove channels I never watched, but I found it had a secondary benefit when my Texan in-laws visited -- "Sorry, our TV package doesn't include Fox News".
A year ago I started moving away from Roku. I think they've always had ads on the home screen which I blocked with a DNS blocklist but the seasonal ad sections that continued popping up in the menu despite my continually blocking them wore on me. I've upgraded to an nvidia shield using projectivy launcher which allows me to set a customized and very clean interface with the just the apps I use and nothing else. I definitely recommend it.
No the Home Screen ads were added in an update 2.5ish years ago. I know this because that is when I decided to disconnect my Roku tv from the internet rather than see ads when I turn my tv on.
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?
I believe dumb TV’s are both more expensive and much harder to compare. I can’t find any dumb TV reviews on rtings.com for example.
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?
Some of that extra cost is for the extra reliability the commercial displays offer, in case anyone wondered. They're designed to be on 24/7 for extended periods.
Roku's hardware business is only 10% of their revenue now. The vast majority of their income comes from their FAST streaming service, which they promote heavily on their devices.
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.
I had to look to see whether this was NewsCorp Fox or Disney Fox. In the 00s I did some contract work at Fox Filmed Entertainment (the part of the company later bought by Disney) which was introduced during interviews as Fox Filmed Entertainment We Have Nothing To Do With Fox News.
Disney has been slowly but delicately clipping the name Fox out of the company names and public facing brands it bought, presumably to further distance from the remaining parts at News Corp (Fox News): 20th Century Fox to 20th Century Studios (which is a sort of funny unwinding of the 1935 merger, I think especially because 20th Century is now such a dated term), Fox Searchlight to Searchlight Pictures, things like that. Most of those brands also generally now report on the org charts directly to their pre-existing Disney counterparts or as direct peers to them and the "Fox Filmed Entertainment" middle layer seems to be almost entirely gone now (as there's no replacement for that name).
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 comment starts by introducing the possibility of confusion between two entities. the further color added via personal anecdote might help put readers in the commenter's shoes
I've already been wanting to get rid of my Roku TVs and boxes for awhile now, they tend to be slow and buggy lately which requires ALOT of restarting.
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.
I never liked the idea of Roku since I always felt like they could "go away at any moment" since that is all they sold basically.
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.
I bought a 42" Hisense Roku TV for like $120 with no prior research from Walmart a few years ago when my old plasma finally passed through to the great beyond. The interface was so clean and pleasant to use and there aren't ads stuffed everywhere.
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.
Then my little Celeron junker will also double as a router. Probably going to have do that anyway since YouTube on PS4 and Roku both serve adds from (what I assume are) hardcoded IP addresses.
I moved away from Roku to a Google TV (as recommended by wirecutter). Its quite fast and remembers my history better. However it is Google so who knows how long it lasts.
I don’t like the idea of Roku being owned by anyone, let alone Fox.
Ugh, Fox. I recently made the decision to not spend $10.99/month for their FoxOne app to stream World Cup matches. I decided to watch the Telemundo broadcasts instead, even though I don’t speak Spanish, just to not give Fox my money. If I were Roku user, this would definitely cause me to quit being a Roku user. I doubt I’d be the only one, but I also do not believe it will be enough total to be noticeable.
I could not handle the Spanish commentary, though. I know that that's a real cultural gap on my side, but Spanish soccer commentary is something I could never get accustomed to - way too much talking for my taste, and I especially cannot relate at all to the goal "celebrations".
I'd rather listen to that than give money to Fox. However, I'm learning that I understand a lot more Spanish that I would have thought. I know enough words that I can at least grasp what I think the topic is, but not the details. Almost like hearing parts of a conversation 3 groups down from you at the bar.
> People talk a big game, but really are unprincipled in general.
At least regarding cybertrucks, pretty much no one is buying them. People are principled - Tesla's brand image is in the gutters and it shows, they are continuously losing market share and SpaceX had to bail out Tesla by buying 131 millions of dollars worth of Cybertrucks.
I used Rokus for years (happily) but they slowly began to degrade the experience with ads on their home screen (that were often not appropriate for children). Due to an unrelated project that required me to purchase an AppleTV I was quickly amazed at how much better their product was. Fast and clean. Never going back.
I used to love Roku. I even went through their early developer stuff to play with custom channels. It was clear many years ago that their shift form platform to ad provider was underway. Why can't a company always be amazing at something and just stick to that (looking at you Dropbox)?
Should we expect the Roku apps for non-Fox content to break? That was kind of the selling point of Roku, that it was relatively streaming platform agnostic, not tied to one of the big players.
It depends. If they have the foresight to know that alienating their existing install base is a bad thing, then maybe they will put in a shoestring budget to keep the lights on for the old stuff.
A company with the business practices of Fox News I will not buy services or products from. Same with regards to Oracle.
I actually regret buying a Nvidia Shield TV. Yes, software support might be there. But what isn't there is the interface (without advertising, the cancer of the world) it came with. Thanks to Google. Thanks to Google, my children are now forced to see inappropriate advertising when the TV gets powered on.
I was dreading my most recent tv purchase (last fall) for exactly this reason, and ended up with TCL google tv. One can apparently setup a google tv as a dumb tv and never sign it into the internet. It acts exactly how I'd want a dumb tv to work now, simply auto uses the most recent hdmi device, or the active one if the most recent one isn't active.
It has never connected to the internet, and it never will. My long term concern is that google will eventually put cell modems in their tvs, and then using my next tv as a dumb tv will no longer be an option. For now though, this is your best bet.
Honest question: why doesn't the dumb TV crowd use old TVs (dunno, 10+ years old) as a replacement? Does image quality difference feel so dramatic? Maybe I don't care about this enough. To me the DVD fidelity was not earth-shattering but fine in practice. I do go to the cinema and see new TVs in stores, so it's not like I haven't seen better, just isn't worth a huge premium for me.
Other things I can think about is reliability of the screen (like dead pixels), and your family if not clued in may think you present as "poor".
I don't see this happening any time in the near future. The extra hardware cost is nontrivial, and there's a software support burden. Cellular bandwidth also isn't free, and probably wouldn't be covered by the value of any ads/telemetry that it carried.
Hopefully? I mean, adding the cell modem is sort of hypothesizing about the future, and if we're already doing that then we might as well also hypothesize that such a future google tv will refuse to display anything from its hdmi inputs until it successfully phones home, and that that happens weekly.
LG + never log it in to the internet + an Apple TV box. The webOS UI sucks, but so do all the others apparently, and you never have to interact with it in practice if you use the Apple TV for streaming.
"fine" is a very accurate word to describe Tizen. It's slow and really hard to find things sometimes (why do TVs not have a simple "input switch" button any more?), but ultimately it gets the job done.
You can make Tizen much faster by manually uninstalling the Samsung TV Plus app. It runs in the background constantly. "Much faster" is still slow overall, unfortunately.
If this happens, our Roku TV is going in the trash. They locked out their customers of their own devices by pushing updated firmware that forced agreement to new terms. They lost my trust during that episode, and this move shows that was the right decision.
Meanwhile, Fox lost my respect decades ago. The idea that they could gain network level access to one of my devices cannot be reconciled with my need to feel secure and safe in my own home.
Anyone wanna take the opportunity to share their favorite brands and models of dumb TVs?
That's what I took notice of... About half their revenue is subscription and about half is advertising. 100m users. $220 per home? I would think that's high.
They certianly have enough to ice the carriers out. I wonder what an HBOMax subscription will cost in a year, I bet a fair bit more.
I switched from Roku to Xbox for Plex because of how Roku has degraded, and not only did I get the primary benefit of being off Roku, but I found the Xbox Plex app has not been updated to the terrible new redesign so it was a double win.
In ~2015 got an Xbox one, as a media center it was an awesome experience:
Kinect voice control to play/pause and other things way before Google home/Amazon echo ecosystem were mature.
Free OTA channels via TV tuner and well designed OneGuide (with ability to pause and rewind).
And of course all the Netflix and other apps, Plex server etc.
But strategically it seems Microsoft decided they wanted to look more like Playstation, focused on gaming (at that time paid Xbox live subscription vs free Playstation)
And as gaws points out, they seem to recently announce to double down on the gaming stuff.
So when they discontinued OneGuide. I picked Roku since they seem to be focused on the media experience primarily... but unsure how I feel about this acquisition news.
Seems like an excellent startup opportunity? Build a clean, no-ads streaming stick with open source firmware upstream of the requisite DRM bits and who wouldn't buy one? Almost like what Roku used to be, and the reason we recommended it, for so many years.
Because it will cost 2-4x compared to a Roku, Amazon Fire, or other device sold below cost and subsidized with ad/VC money. And in order to work on the DRMed streaming platforms, you have to play along with the industry. Can't just relabel a random box from Shenzhen, "upstream of the requisite DRM bits" makes no sense.
The original NVIDIA Shield is more than 10 years old at this point and still sells used for around $100 and people are still paying $200 retail for a new 2019 Pro. Interestingly, that price has basically stayed flat at $200 from 2020 to 2026. You can install Lineage or whatever if you don't care about the DRM. It's exactly what HN people want, and that's how much it costs.
Can you clarify the DRM comment? Do streaming services not work or they get downscaled to some garbage resolution?
I am looking for options and being able to sideload on a Shield is attractive, but if the experience is no different than a homemade Linux HTPC, I can save the cash.
This is full on Google Play Services certification and more. Ultimately to get the thing that can run/stream Netflix etc the amount of work just isn't viable for the price point people would pay for this.
Also the truth is no investor would touch this on hardware sale income alone, needs some subscription plan at least.
Roku was always a weird one, beloved by people who couldn't stand laggy built in TV interface but doesn't really offer much beyond what TVs come with anyway.
This sounds great to me, but the mainstream market has shown they probably wouldn't pay even $5 more for such a device when something they think is good enough is built into the TV.
I have mostly Frame TVs and a projector. I always loved the Roku experience, it really felt like the best media player software, they just kept improving it, and having all TVs on the ecosystem made it even better. One app for virtual remotes, bluetooth listening, searching with your phone keyboard, etc.
I don't want to go back to the Frame's software. I really like the Backdrops app and so many other features.
But it just seems like this acquisition can only accelerate the ensh*tification of Roku. They already changed the default home screen a few weeks ago to show recommendations, SO MANY ads, etc and you change it in settings.
But as other commentors have mentioned, now we'll probably have Fox News and Truth Social front and center whether we want it or not.
So many apps have DRM that prevent you from running it yourself in any way. Is there another way that lets you run Netflix, Paramount+, HBO, all the majors without any trouble that is as integrated as Roku, or at least anything heading in that direction?
It’s not really a viable option if you wanted to. I have two Frames and they both just keep deteriorating to the point they are pretty useless. I have added an appletv to one of them and it’s vastly improved the UX. Now the only thing I need to do with the Samsung software is the unreasonably slow task of switching inputs.
I can't really see this ending well for the end user, however well it does/doesn't end for the stakeholders.
I thought Roku took off due to their focus on the streaming platform itself, and being agnostic to the streaming services that could be accessed via that platform. Having one specific content producer buy that platform feels like it destroys or devalues the USP of the platform, at least from the point of view of the consumer/end-user.
Or is this just another step in the relentless enshittification of all services?
So now the same corporation that owns Fox News is going to own Roku? No thanks. Guess it's finally time to switch to a custom Android TV box or Apple TV. Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.
They already own Tubi (think Hulu alternative) which I've used when literally no other streaming service had what I was looking for, and is surprisingly decent. I assume this is the beginning of their leap into streaming, wont be surprised if there's other acquisitions that will take place in similar spaces.
Personally I never bought into Roku because I didn't think they'd last very long.
> Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.
I agree, there seem to be no good options for this. You can use Kodi or whatever, but I want something that supports playing my ... totally legally acquired content... and Netflix/Disney/iPlayer/etc. In a package that's silent and low power.
Doesn't seem to exist unfortunately. I guess the closest is Nvidia Shield. You can apparently still sideload APKs onto that... for now. I'll buy one when they release an update. I'm patient!
Yeah, this space seems pretty sparse. Some of the Radxa SBCs are getting closer to a hardware solution for your vision, but there isn't real mainstream software. A self-hosted DNLA server is probably the most realistic option but DNLA has seemed to fall by the wayside in favor of paid streaming and plex/jellyfin.
That said, Tailscale did not exist when DNLA was popular, and DNLA over Tailscale seems a really promising non-jellyfin avenue.
Ultimately the problem will be lack of hardware decoders and poor interop with Dolby, DTS, etc.
I would not recommend Apple TV. I like the computers and the phone, but the TV is disappoint. Would recommend Nvidia Shield or something.
What I am going to do down the line personally is just buy a gaming laptop and use that. Can play games via Steam and watch stuff via Windows apps (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll).
Only problem of course is the laptop will be pricier, but if someone was going to buy a tv streaming thing AND a gaming system of some kind, probably cheaper.
If you already have a gaming desktop, I can recommend Shield for both. Streaming services work out of the box of course. Then I use Sunshine[1] on my desktop to stream to Moonlight on the Shield. Both have wired ethernet connections. Latency is not noticeable in most cases.
I like the laptop idea, I'd go with Linux instead of Windows, and even then I think it would be a challenge to get it working well with a remote. Nvidia Shield is just Android TV, which means handing Google all your data. Of course, Apple TV means handing Apple all your data, but that seems like maybe the least bad option. I don't know, I'm just tired of all of this shit.
Agree Apple TV is not especially impressive (like, it’s fine, but I especially dislike the remote). I mostly just use my playstation, but there are some apps (criterion being the main one) that are not on the PS, so I use the Apple TV for those
I resisted buying an apple tv for a long time, because I was going to have a playstation either way for games!
The (relatively) poor quality and difficulty of hooking my laptop up to the TV for criterion eventually pushed me to get one just for that, since there’s no word on if criterion has any plans to release an app for PS
As a long-time[1] customer of Roku I am tentatively extremely pessimistic.
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."
Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Of course, Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs chock full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.
The only issue with Apple TV is they still can't figure out a good remote. I feel like I need to hold my breath and be very intentional with my swipes so when I'm e.g. swiping up/down to get to a menu where I can turn on subtitles I don't accidentally swipe left or right, sending me scrubbing 17 minutes forward.
Either touch is a bad input mechanism for controlling your TV, or Apple hasn't figured it out.
> I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there
It definitely is.
IMO the only advantage of the Nvidia Shield is better HDMI audio passthrough but it has so many other issues. And with more recent versions of the Plex client for tvOS the lack of audio passthrough is much less of an issue than it used to be (PCM conversion used to introduce sync issues). Also the Plex app for Android TV has been getting consistently worse over the years for me. Plus all the ads Android TV added a couple of years ago. Ugh.
Some of the more exotic boxes out there to run CoreELEC have tehcnically better DV support. These might work if you only want a Plex or Kodi client but for general streaming the Apple TV is just better.
Honestly can't wait for Apple to release a new one. Hopefully with audio passthrough of more codecs.
A few reasons I'm staying positive towards Apple, despite being a streamer themselves, is that they're not large at all. They've currently remained a small, niche content provider of reasonably high-quality content. They don't seem to have the aspirations to be bigger than those on their platform. Also, they have so much increasing oversight on their App Store and decisions there, that they likely do not want to do anything that shows a preference and gains the ire of governing agencies. I'm hoping this keep them relatively neutral.
Despite becoming quite critical of Apple in many other areas, I agree with your assessment here. And hopefully they realize if they started getting so anticompetitive in this space that they start elbowing "non-Apple" streamers out of the picture on their platform, the loss would be Apple's. A streaming box that doesn't have Netflix, or that is missing another major, would be far less compelling than what it is today.
If the box where I can’t set up a third party player to do the ‘replay last 5 seconds with subtitles on’ because it’s all locked down is the best then I don’t want to know what the worst is, I’ll just keep using LibreElec. At least if LibreElec does something I don’t like Claude can fix it.
The Apple TV (hardware) can do what you're asking using a voice command "What did he/she say". It's possible it no longer works in every app because services insist on writing their own players that don't work as well as the player provided by Apple TV.
When Subtitles are set to 'auto' i think it now automatically turns the subtitles on like that when you do the skip back command.
But yeah, the Siri way (much as I loathe using Siri) is the definite way.
What box do you put librelec on?
[Removed bad comment. Sorry.]
Wow entitled gatekeeping much?
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.
|If the box where I can’t set up a third party player to do the ‘replay last 5 seconds with subtitles on’ because it’s all locked down
You do you, but I find that to be a truly niche thing to throw away an entire platform over. It literally does everything else better imho.
Can confirm Apple is best but Roku is amazingly good number 2. In some ways its UX beats Apple.
Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in. I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.
> I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.
Sure I guess. But those devices objectively suck. the CPU and storage in "smart TVs" are so underpowered that using streaming apps on them is painfully sluggish.
For comparison, I've used the "Chromecast with Google TV" (a $50ish at its release 4k streaming stick that uses the 'Google TV', fka 'Android TV' platform) and a Sony TV on the same platform, released the same year. The Sony UI is a lot more sluggish than the Google stick device. Also tested running an SNES emulator. The Google device can easily do it, the Sony TV can't keep up even on a basic game like Super Mario World.
And then of course, on the other end of the spectrum, the Apple TV exists, which specs-wise can easily play 3D racing games at a fine framerate.
With Roku built in as well as whatever ad pipeline(s) the TV manufacturer wants. These days my AppleTV is allowed to talk to the internet. My television is not.
Eh those TVs are a dubious value proposition. I grabbed one and wound up returning it because it won't even let you use the TV as a damned TV without connecting it to the internet and creating a roku account so they can track you.
Some apps on the apple tv still have ads on the pause screen (covering the content I may have wanted to pause to see, a terrible UX choice). It can't be entirely avoided.
It can if you avoid a dedicated device and just hook a desktop up to your TV. It's a one time cost to set up a host you control and that seems to be getting more and more worth it.
Is there a solution for audio and video downscaling when accessing content via the browser in a linux htpc setup?
I don't think any of the big streaming content providers have native apps on linux and no browser can pass through audio bitstreams to HDMI. Video quality is limited as well.
Having a dedicated streaming box is better in this regard
Yep, Apple TV has long been my preferred streaming box. I put one on every TV and don't connect the TV to the network. Plex and YouTube are probably my top apps and while YouTube is maddening (just horrible UI/UX), I find Plex to be mostly enjoyable or at least reliable and unsurprising.
Unironically, the best streaming box out there is a PC where you can hook up ad block and stream content from independent content providers like Dropout and Nebula using their web-based UI.
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.
Definitely. It's un-bloated and simple in a sea of options that are progressively slower and shittier.
Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.
> Roku's decision to get involved in streaming content at all
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.
Services are really never safe. Or at best, they should be considered temporary. If you like what they provide, know that what they provide could become worse and/or more expensive. This is the likeliest scenario.
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.
Are there any alternatives that are independent of streaming services?
Recently got a Google Smart TV for the first time, instead of Roku, and I hate it so much. Roku interestingly I think folded in ads in the most non-obtrusive way (except for the full screen ads which I think were quickly abandoned). But Google Smart TV is a completely intentional bid for sticky integration that fosters Google dependence (google login, google telemetry tracking what you watch inside of other apps, other streamers are google apps), which is not how I want to experience my streaming. It's also slow and sometimes glitchy. I had never had a TV capable of crashing before.
Roku at least felt non-evil or non-evil adjacent in its notional neutrality.
Google and Apple seem like the best competition and they do have streaming services, although Google's is just their bad YouTube tv thing and very ignorable. I'm not sure Amazon is even in the running now.
The Nvidia shield used to be a decent streaming box?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Wf_jy5WqOPShczFKQB2...
shield is still competitive. It has become a little laggy but apparently that can be fixed by swapping out the launcher.
They (ETA nvidia shield) added ads many years ago. Really left a bitter taste in my mouth after paying for an ad-free "premium" device to have them shoved out there.
Who is they?
horsawlarway is correct regarding the nvidia shield. I'm not sure how much is nvidia, and how much is google in the "they". I kinda blame nvidia more than google (if I bought a google device I would expect google ads as part of the purchase), but it's hard for me to say. "they" the people who actually own the streaming device (nvidia shield) I "purchased" updated the software and added a lot of ads.
The ads showed up when the launcher got a major redesign, and the Google TV (or whatever they call it this week) launcher is a Google product. I seem to remember that nVidia delayed shipping the new enshittified version for quite a long time, so I'm pretty confident Google gets the blame here.
Assuming the nvidia shield.
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.)
Are there solid existing launchers that can be swapped in? Changing the launcher is one of the first things I do when I get a new Pixel phone and highly recommend it, but I don't really want to have to maintain a vibe coded one.
I've used Projectivy for years on every Google TV stick I own (Google/Onn). Works perfectly with full customization/zero ads on the free version and has built in workaround to take over the Home navigation to bypass the built-in launcher without ADB or rooting. I chip-in for the premium version to help out the dev since I get so much value out of it but the freemium features are mostly just cosmetic and the free version has everything you need.
Projectivy seems good and I use it on cheap android / Google TV devices since learning about it last month.
I tried projectivity launcher on one of these and it seemed reasonably good.
At this point if I'm dealing with that level of hassle I'm much happier running linux on a computer. The value add of these devices was plug and play, and if it's not that why bother.
ADB is rarely actually a requirement unless you really want to do it the "right" way and fully remove the launcher.
I always use a custom launcher (Projectivy) on my Google TV devices, lately typically the $20 Onn stick and intercept the Home navigation to open the launcher either using the option built into Projectivy or with a free app from the Play Store/Fdroid.
Takes <5 minutes to setup everything once and then I basically forget the native Google TV launcher exists. Pretty much unbeatable value for a $20 ad-free Jellyfin/Plex/Kodi/Stremio setup. YMMV with different models but I also had no issues remapping the remote buttons from Netflix/etc to my own apps (including the "Free TV" button to launch Stremio which I always enjoy).
Also (somewhat ironically) the best smart TV OS to look for on cheap/subsidized TVs is built-in Google TV. Since they can easily be configured as 100% "dumb" on startup without any ads/nags/etc (it's the first question you're asked). The TV never hits Wifi to update and the remote/menus just do normal TV stuff without any "smart" features. Otherwise, it's luck of the draw how miserable/impossible the manufacturer makes avoiding Wifi/updates.
(Or you could do the same process installing the custom launcher on the TV's built-in Googe TV, but then you're at the mercy of the CPU/RAM the OEM included in BoM some # of years ago and lose the clean seperation between dumb TV/replaceable stick).
$20 Onn stick + $199 "smart" Google TV in dumb mode goes really far these days for a locally hosted setup without ads/annoyances.
Look into the TiVo Stream 4K. It’s an Android box but has been very reliable for me. Tivo does force some quirks so I used ADB to disable core services and the default launcher has ads so I switched to Projectivy launcher.
An android tv you can buy them for 20$, and put any apps
You can go to Walmart and buy a streaming box that is a Raspberry pi-sized board with custom Android installed and the package claims it has 700+ channels. But it just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites.
> it just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites
Not "just". You left out its role as a bot network exit node.
It is also a gateway for "residential proxy networks", AKA botnets for rent.
Which is a decent trade off for unlimited content.
"I'm willing to make everyone else's life worse for minor personal convenience"
Ah, the choice content providers made a few years back that put us all in this situation to begin with - throw constant ads at us for marginal revenue.
That's the spirit of the age here in America, no? When so many of our leading public figures are hyper-wealthy individuals who are where they're via various sorts of shuffling costs onto others and pocketing profits, is it any surprise when the public seeks to do the same?
It's ultimately utterly destructive, of course. Wish I had a good solution.
> just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites
Now you're making it sound even more interesting. What is the name of this device?
“Superbox” I believe.
just use something that you can run a torrent client (and use tpb.party with adblocker). Those apps are malware and botnets.
Not really. Apple TV seems to be the closest ive found to not being riddled with ads though. the home screen doesn't have ads at all, the closest which exists is the "top shelf" feature when you hover over the Apple TV app, and that can be turned off in settings. But it has some other issues
I do a lot of my streaming with Apple TV, but the worst parts about the Apple TV app are in my opinion are:
- 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.
I think GP was talking about the hardware AppleTV, not the streaming service AppleTV (which are stupidly named).
and the apple tv app! which is different from the box and the streaming service which was formerly called Apple TV Plus
I'm pretty happy with AppleTV except for the walled garden. I want to run Kodi. I do run it via XCode and a dev account but because of the app restrictions it's a 2nd class experience. Looked for alternatives like Jellyfin but the only ones on the app store all appear to spy on what you view.
You should check out Infuse.
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.
Yeah I mean if you want something FOSS this isn't for you, but neither was a Roku which is what I was responding to
I'm not totally tracking what you're saying, Jellyfin isn't exactly Kodi, it's more like Plex, and Jellyfin does have an app in beta for AppleTV but the best way (arguably) to experience Jellyfin, Emby or possibly even Plex on any Apple product is the Infuse app.
I run Plex and am pretty happy. Will likely eventually switch to Jellyfin as Plex is getting lamer and lamer.
Jellyfin's worst aspect is the opinionated file structure. You have to set up folders the way it wants, and then the resulting UI browser is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Pretty sure it's done this way for automated metadata discovery.
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.
how can you live with that awful remote?
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 really like the remote. It has mute and volume and like swiping on the top rather than clicking.
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.
The new remote has a mute button. Old remote was garbage.
? it has a mute button and I find it as responsive as my old shield tv.
I have been reading these threads where people are patching firmware with AI. I am wondering if there is a way to fix some of the privacy issues on Roku tvs given this deal.
go on...
I was an early roku user and ditched them because they’ve sucked for 10+ years. Their players have been trash and had poor support.
Amazing they got $22B and tivo must be really kicking itself.
2008? I had the Roku HD1000 [1]. :)
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.
[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/bMGBqm4mTmfUNJG39
Well, color me impressed -- my understanding was that Roku was formed as a spinoff from Netflix around the release of their first streaming player. This is sort of confirmed by the Roku wikipedia article, which does not, for example, mention the HD1000 at all!
I guess Wood founded Roku but it was basically semi-defunct when we went to work for Netflix, and then the "spinoff" was basically letting Wood poach his team from Netflix over to his existing company to staff up and sell the first streaming device.
I was also super-early Roku customer, but frankly I have been mostly disappointed with Roku for the past year or so.
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 lagginess is a puzzle to me; one big selling point of the Roku (vs. e.g. the Amazon Fire Stick) is that it is so much more responsive, but newer models have been getting worse instead of better.
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.
Every time I use the Roku AppleTV app I am baffled as to how the designers think the selected state is remotely acceptable.
I guess I’ll just randomly press the arrow buttons until I notice which box is getting slightly larger.
Thanks for the response. As a lifetime Plex passer, I am inured to having to re-learn the navigation UI with every new release, so that part can't be too bad.
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.
Roku hasn't been 'agnostic' since RokuTV or the Roku Channel, or whatever-the-fuck it's called. I watch with a GoogleTV device, connected to my Roku television through HDMI. A few months ago I started seeing these weird popups, saying something like, "I see you're watching 'The Goonies'. Why not watch on RokuTV?" It was bizarre, and a little creepy considering I wasn't using the Roku platform at all. As it turned out, Roku added a 'feature' for doing content recommendations. I disabled that 'feature', but it was still weird, like, "These guys are watching what I'm watching, even when I'm not on their platform!"
Smart TVs are always monitoring what you’re watching by taking screenshots and processing them. This is a known thing for at least several years now. The only safe way to use a smart TV is to never connect it to the network, and use another streaming device. That separate device will spy on you too, but at least you’re making the choice.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2449198-smart-tvs-take-...
> Bad enough in my mind that they had in-platform ads instead of just charging for hardware
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?
Obviously preferences vary, but I would prefer to accumulate the goodwill rather than the ad fees. I'm not a saint and I would probably try to have some sort of "buy the roku streamer v7, now with <some new feature that I don't backport>".
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.
You have to realize that you are not in the same financial situation as the vast majority of people (based on the hoity-toity nature that HN readers are all well paid). The vast majority of people just accept ads as part of life and do not care one bit about the evils of the adTech world. If they are able to get a service essentially for free or at least a significant discount, they don't mind ads. Most people don't even notice them. If an ad free paid for service was the only option, I'd suggest that a lot of the user numbers would drop.
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...
A lot of average people will also pirate if it's cheap and the UI is good. There was a pretty brisk business selling cheap hacked firetv sticks to people for that
When ever is pirating not cheap? Isn't that the whole point?
Less technically inclined users can be tricked into paying for pirated content, especially if the free way requires a little set up or work.
The problem with the companies run by people who want to accumulate goodwill is that they will always be outcompeted by companies run by shithead assholes making number go up, because empirical evidence is that not enough consumers give a shit about goodwill to make it a real competitive advantage.
Yes, let the enshitification begin.
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
Begin? I haven’t heard anything positive about Roku in 10 years or so. They had to race to the bottom to compete with Amazon and Google. And maybe they mostly survived til now, but all I hear is complaints about ads.
Nah. I have a Roku 3 stick and a brand-new $700 projector with Google TV. The Roku 3 is light-years ahead in terms of speed and UI ergonomics over the Google machine. And both are better than the smart TVs I've used.
But I fear this need means this time is ending, and we'll only be left with crap.
I think the complaint about ads is mostly a knee-jerk reaction by certain online communities. The ads are not particularly obnoxious - they are always off to the side and don't interfere in navigation in any way.
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.
On my Roku the ads aren't just off to the side. When I go to the home screen there are now "recommended" shows above and below my channels, and they are initially selected, so I have to scroll down past them to get to my actual channels.
Every one of those sections can be trivially turned off in the settings. Mine just have the list of apps I installed on my device.
Yes, which you have to do repeatedly after every software update when they change your settings.
my household and extended family has been running on roku for literally over a decade, in multiple countries, and not one person has complained. all of us, myself included, are perfectly happy with it
I’d be shocked if the Jellyfin App survives this. Plex probably will, as a for-profit company it has the war chest to buy placement/attention/app approval. But i prefer jellyfin because it doesnt try to sell me anything or tell me what to watch.
Fox owns Tubi, which has a similar model to PlutoTV.
There is the long standing problem that if you build a road for others, and others get unfathomably rich using that road, you end up looking pretty dumb.
And yet, advancement of civilization depends on that.
I may be lambasted for saying this, but I do not believe that Fox (or any large media company, really) should be permitted to purchase direct access to the TV hardware of roughly 30-50% of american households.
Much in the same way that the company selling tickets and taking a percentage of all ticket resales shouldn't also own the venues which can then force artists to use a specific ticketing provider, thus creating a monopoly.
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.
RCA owned NBC until 1986, when it was bought by GE. GE soon exited the TV business, but retained NBC for another two decades.
The Fox News audience has been told to passionately disagree with you.
that law does not exist, probably because not enough people feel that way
That’s a pretty naive model of how laws get passed in the US. A lot of laws would be different if your model held true.
s/people/money
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.
Your reasoning does not stand at all. There are plenty of things that the majority of people agree upon in this country but it does not get done for a variety of reasons. For example, it's not as important as other issues so they can't prioritize it for voting, gerrymandering, etc...
It literally does? Things that people care strongly about get prioritized. I said others don't feel like the OP. Maybe they agree with the point if presented with the choice, but again, they don't feel the same way, so they don't think, protest, comment, demand it in the way the OP does.
Not at all. I can feel very strongly about that, but if I feel more strongly about health care so tens of thousands of people don't die needlessly and countless millions more don't go bankrupt or get maimed from lack treatment, one is going to win over the other. That doesn't mean I don't feel strongly about it. Also, the 600,000 in Wyoming get the same two senators as the 40,000,000 people in California so it's not like there is equal representation by any means.
Like I said, not enough people care about it enough to push for legislation.
And proportional representation is found in the House of Representatives. We have a bicameral legislature.
More accurately, they adwquately don't give politicians the money and exercise the power of wealth.
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-...
or, you know, lobbying and oligarchy. great at changing outcomes even when the folks agree.
Or because the Epstein class has used their stranglehold of the media and politics to push that belief.
As someone who has canceled all my subscriptions and just uses Jellyfin for 100% of my content, what are some good options besides a Roku?
I would love to have hardware like Roku, but just run a jellyfin client, with no need to even have Internet, just access to my jellyfin server on my local network.
It would need to be family approved as I don't need another project. I am not interested in AppleTV or a Google device (unless it can be 100% degoogled).
Has anyone ever successfully gotten things like CoreELEC/LibreELEC to work well?
I wish jellyfin would just sell some hardware, preloaded with a great jellyfin client. I'd pay a premium for it to help fund software development.
Time for the 'Fox News' button on the Roku remote. Truth Social tweets on your screensaver.
I have never paid for any cable TV or video streaming service in my life. Reason is simple, I don't want to financially support people / shows / stations that go against my personal standards of human decency.
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.
When I got my house, I needed to set up internet, and Verizon FIOS was what I went for.
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.
I'm sure they're forced to do that and graded on how many upgrades they sell. Their bosses will even listen on calls and if they don't make all those pitches, they'll get written up or fired. Source: seen it first-person.
Yeah, I wasn't really upset with the guy for reading his script. I'm sure he was doing what he was trained to do. I figured that if I gave the little diatribe then I kind of figured that he wouldn't get in trouble for just moving on.
> I'll will end my life before ever supporting Fox News.
Subjecting a Filipino call center operator who is just doing her job to such melodramatic threats is not the flex you think it is.
Fox is offensive, racist propagandistic garbage though. I get that part.
Dont forget the lying. They love to lie.
I'm impressed that you were able to cancel SiriusXM. I thought that it was set up to cling to people for life, and possibly continue billing their estate after death.
I think they actually got in trouble with a lawsuit over that?
FWIW I canceled my SiriusXM like a year ago and it wasn't too hard. Just a web form.
All they do now is hound you incessantly until the end of time with a rock-bottom price for 6 months.
.
What's extreme about trying to live your values?
I don't see politics as left and right. To me they are in the shape of a Radar chart or Radial Column chart or Sunburst diagram.
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.
If you are saying that being against giving FOX News money is some wild example of the left-wing equivalent to the extreme right-wing extremism... You might want to take the clown paint off and reconsider.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168530 lol. Just lol.
Actually, a more likely button might be "Sports" which would either open your preferred sports app (smarter way to do it) and default to Fox Sports, or a "Stream TV" type button that opens up Tubi which is already run by Fox, and surprisingly had decent content on it.
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.
Why would this be more likely? The current remotes already have a Netflix button, a Hulu button, a Sling button and a Disney+ button. Roku sells dedicated buttons on their remotes to the highest bidder.
Back when we had things like Dish and cable, I was able to put a "Parental Block" on channels. I used this to hide or remove channels I never watched, but I found it had a secondary benefit when my Texan in-laws visited -- "Sorry, our TV package doesn't include Fox News".
A year ago I started moving away from Roku. I think they've always had ads on the home screen which I blocked with a DNS blocklist but the seasonal ad sections that continued popping up in the menu despite my continually blocking them wore on me. I've upgraded to an nvidia shield using projectivy launcher which allows me to set a customized and very clean interface with the just the apps I use and nothing else. I definitely recommend it.
No the Home Screen ads were added in an update 2.5ish years ago. I know this because that is when I decided to disconnect my Roku tv from the internet rather than see ads when I turn my tv on.
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?
I believe dumb TV’s are both more expensive and much harder to compare. I can’t find any dumb TV reviews on rtings.com for example.
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?
Some of that extra cost is for the extra reliability the commercial displays offer, in case anyone wondered. They're designed to be on 24/7 for extended periods.
Roku's hardware business is only 10% of their revenue now. The vast majority of their income comes from their FAST streaming service, which they promote heavily on their devices.
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.
I had to look to see whether this was NewsCorp Fox or Disney Fox. In the 00s I did some contract work at Fox Filmed Entertainment (the part of the company later bought by Disney) which was introduced during interviews as Fox Filmed Entertainment We Have Nothing To Do With Fox News.
Disney has been slowly but delicately clipping the name Fox out of the company names and public facing brands it bought, presumably to further distance from the remaining parts at News Corp (Fox News): 20th Century Fox to 20th Century Studios (which is a sort of funny unwinding of the 1935 merger, I think especially because 20th Century is now such a dated term), Fox Searchlight to Searchlight Pictures, things like that. Most of those brands also generally now report on the org charts directly to their pre-existing Disney counterparts or as direct peers to them and the "Fox Filmed Entertainment" middle layer seems to be almost entirely gone now (as there's no replacement for that name).
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.
It's the Murdoch one.
Whats the relevancy here of which Fox subsidiary you did contract work for as it relates to the Roku offer?
These aren't subsidiaries of each other. They're different companies with different ownership. So the name Fox is ambiguous.
If you read the comments here i think you can determine without a doubt which Fox we're talking about. The unhinged came out in full force.
You mean the comments that came in after the one you replied to here?
The commenter asked a question and it was answered. I don't think your hostile reply was needed.
>The unhinged came out in full force.
Ohhh, trust us, we know. You've made 10 trolling comments in the past 30 minutes with a 2 day old acct
the comment starts by introducing the possibility of confusion between two entities. the further color added via personal anecdote might help put readers in the commenter's shoes
Some alternative sources
- Fox PR: https://www.foxcorporation.com/news/corp-press-releases/2026...
- Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-buy-roku-...
- An important update about Roku https://www.roku.com/blog/roku-fox
I've already been wanting to get rid of my Roku TVs and boxes for awhile now, they tend to be slow and buggy lately which requires ALOT of restarting.
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.
I never liked the idea of Roku since I always felt like they could "go away at any moment" since that is all they sold basically.
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.
> rebranded Wyze cameras
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.
"I never liked the idea of Roku since I always felt like they could "go away at any moment" since that is all they sold basically."
That's odd since they've been around for 23 years. I would understand that stance 20 years ago.
I first heard of them in the early 2010s so it was not that odd back then.
But your claim was about "always" feeling that way, not "at first".
I bought a 42" Hisense Roku TV for like $120 with no prior research from Walmart a few years ago when my old plasma finally passed through to the great beyond. The interface was so clean and pleasant to use and there aren't ads stuffed everywhere.
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.
That works until the ads are hosted from the same domain name
Then my little Celeron junker will also double as a router. Probably going to have do that anyway since YouTube on PS4 and Roku both serve adds from (what I assume are) hardcoded IP addresses.
I moved away from Roku to a Google TV (as recommended by wirecutter). Its quite fast and remembers my history better. However it is Google so who knows how long it lasts.
I don’t like the idea of Roku being owned by anyone, let alone Fox.
Ugh, Fox. I recently made the decision to not spend $10.99/month for their FoxOne app to stream World Cup matches. I decided to watch the Telemundo broadcasts instead, even though I don’t speak Spanish, just to not give Fox my money. If I were Roku user, this would definitely cause me to quit being a Roku user. I doubt I’d be the only one, but I also do not believe it will be enough total to be noticeable.
I could not handle the Spanish commentary, though. I know that that's a real cultural gap on my side, but Spanish soccer commentary is something I could never get accustomed to - way too much talking for my taste, and I especially cannot relate at all to the goal "celebrations".
I'd rather listen to that than give money to Fox. However, I'm learning that I understand a lot more Spanish that I would have thought. I know enough words that I can at least grasp what I think the topic is, but not the details. Almost like hearing parts of a conversation 3 groups down from you at the bar.
Do you think people will throw away their perfectly functioning devices because of politics?
Nah, they'll just put a "i bought it before elon went crazy" sticker on their brand-new cybertruck.
People talk a big game, but really are unprincipled in general.
> People talk a big game, but really are unprincipled in general.
At least regarding cybertrucks, pretty much no one is buying them. People are principled - Tesla's brand image is in the gutters and it shows, they are continuously losing market share and SpaceX had to bail out Tesla by buying 131 millions of dollars worth of Cybertrucks.
No, that's why I said that if any one did, it would be so low of a number that nobody would notice.
I used Rokus for years (happily) but they slowly began to degrade the experience with ads on their home screen (that were often not appropriate for children). Due to an unrelated project that required me to purchase an AppleTV I was quickly amazed at how much better their product was. Fast and clean. Never going back.
I feel the same about disney when they started adding hulu content to the main app.
I used to love Roku. I even went through their early developer stuff to play with custom channels. It was clear many years ago that their shift form platform to ad provider was underway. Why can't a company always be amazing at something and just stick to that (looking at you Dropbox)?
I have a Roku TV an dmy setup is simple:
- Disable wifi on Roku TV
- Add Apple TV and connect to router
Should we expect the Roku apps for non-Fox content to break? That was kind of the selling point of Roku, that it was relatively streaming platform agnostic, not tied to one of the big players.
What do you think? Does it make sense that Fox would invest the entire value of their own company for that end goal?
It depends. If they have the foresight to know that alienating their existing install base is a bad thing, then maybe they will put in a shoestring budget to keep the lights on for the old stuff.
The Amazon Firestick works with other services but heavily promotes Amazon stuff. I'd expect it to be like that.
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/fox-roku-deal-f6e564f9?st...
A company with the business practices of Fox News I will not buy services or products from. Same with regards to Oracle.
I actually regret buying a Nvidia Shield TV. Yes, software support might be there. But what isn't there is the interface (without advertising, the cancer of the world) it came with. Thanks to Google. Thanks to Google, my children are now forced to see inappropriate advertising when the TV gets powered on.
It's very easy to block the Shield home screen ad with pihole
gross, is there any TV is that isn’t Google or Roku that is halfway decent?
Bring back dumb TVs
I was dreading my most recent tv purchase (last fall) for exactly this reason, and ended up with TCL google tv. One can apparently setup a google tv as a dumb tv and never sign it into the internet. It acts exactly how I'd want a dumb tv to work now, simply auto uses the most recent hdmi device, or the active one if the most recent one isn't active.
It has never connected to the internet, and it never will. My long term concern is that google will eventually put cell modems in their tvs, and then using my next tv as a dumb tv will no longer be an option. For now though, this is your best bet.
Honest question: why doesn't the dumb TV crowd use old TVs (dunno, 10+ years old) as a replacement? Does image quality difference feel so dramatic? Maybe I don't care about this enough. To me the DVD fidelity was not earth-shattering but fine in practice. I do go to the cinema and see new TVs in stores, so it's not like I haven't seen better, just isn't worth a huge premium for me.
Other things I can think about is reliability of the screen (like dead pixels), and your family if not clued in may think you present as "poor".
You'll be able to stop the signal if they add cellular data. Still annoying though.
I don't see this happening any time in the near future. The extra hardware cost is nontrivial, and there's a software support burden. Cellular bandwidth also isn't free, and probably wouldn't be covered by the value of any ads/telemetry that it carried.
Hopefully? I mean, adding the cell modem is sort of hypothesizing about the future, and if we're already doing that then we might as well also hypothesize that such a future google tv will refuse to display anything from its hdmi inputs until it successfully phones home, and that that happens weekly.
You can get an off-brand Android TV and install a custom launcher like https://at4klauncher.com/
My parents bought an Amazon TV at Costco that is surprisingly responsive for being a smart TV.
Buy an AppleTV box and don't connect the TV to WiFi.
LG seems to still be somewhat agnostic.
I picked up an android TV box for $25 that works with LineageOS.
It sucks because its android, but at least its degoogled.
Edit: for a TV, I love my 30 year old Panasonic. Paid $20 for it at the Mormon goodwill. Only 720p, but has the best speakers of any TV I've owned.
Google/Android TV seems totally fine and capable as long as you use a custom launcher to eliminate all the advertising on the home screen.
Google doesn't do scummy screen spying ("ACR", Automatic Content Recognition).
LG + never log it in to the internet + an Apple TV box. The webOS UI sucks, but so do all the others apparently, and you never have to interact with it in practice if you use the Apple TV for streaming.
I was leery of of Tizen on my Samsung TV but it's fine
"fine" is a very accurate word to describe Tizen. It's slow and really hard to find things sometimes (why do TVs not have a simple "input switch" button any more?), but ultimately it gets the job done.
You can make Tizen much faster by manually uninstalling the Samsung TV Plus app. It runs in the background constantly. "Much faster" is still slow overall, unfortunately.
If this happens, our Roku TV is going in the trash. They locked out their customers of their own devices by pushing updated firmware that forced agreement to new terms. They lost my trust during that episode, and this move shows that was the right decision.
Meanwhile, Fox lost my respect decades ago. The idea that they could gain network level access to one of my devices cannot be reconciled with my need to feel secure and safe in my own home.
Anyone wanna take the opportunity to share their favorite brands and models of dumb TVs?
I use a sony projector as my tv -- it's a finicky expensive device, but the picture is good and there's no apps or network connection on it
The closest thing you will fine to a dumb tv is a commercial display, which will not be available with the latest OLED, 120hz, etc.
You have to buy a smart TV and disable the internet + external device like Apple TV or Nvidia Shield.
> Anyone wanna take the opportunity to share their favorite brands and models of dumb TVs?
You can find them in your local Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist region.
I think I’m going with a Google TV. I already trust them on my phones anyway.
If you want more control buy a pc monitor and some speakers or commercial display.
Any but never connect it to the internet and use an appletv
I remember when Google buying YouTube for $1.6b sounded crazy. And then when then-Facebook Meta bought WhatsApp for 10 times that.
$22b.
Are there any companies left that are not in the decabillion range?
That's what I took notice of... About half their revenue is subscription and about half is advertising. 100m users. $220 per home? I would think that's high.
They certianly have enough to ice the carriers out. I wonder what an HBOMax subscription will cost in a year, I bet a fair bit more.
Yes, hundreds of thousands of companies, if you are interested. But you're here.
This is the next MySpace deal.
Glad that at least one of the Amiga guys finally gets rich.
I wonder how many TV brands that include Roku on their TVs will dump them going forward especially for the non-american markets.
Well, I certainly will never buy another one. I doubt I am alone.
Sadly there are enough loyal fanatics that I can imagine they will continue to be sold indefinitely.
Wouldn't somebody who boycotts a company to boycott a different company to boycott a third company be the fanatic in this case?
The companies become one after the purchase. That's how purchases work.
I switched from Roku to Xbox for Plex because of how Roku has degraded, and not only did I get the primary benefit of being off Roku, but I found the Xbox Plex app has not been updated to the terrible new redesign so it was a double win.
I did the opposite switch:
In ~2015 got an Xbox one, as a media center it was an awesome experience:
Kinect voice control to play/pause and other things way before Google home/Amazon echo ecosystem were mature.
Free OTA channels via TV tuner and well designed OneGuide (with ability to pause and rewind).
And of course all the Netflix and other apps, Plex server etc.
But strategically it seems Microsoft decided they wanted to look more like Playstation, focused on gaming (at that time paid Xbox live subscription vs free Playstation)
And as gaws points out, they seem to recently announce to double down on the gaming stuff.
So when they discontinued OneGuide. I picked Roku since they seem to be focused on the media experience primarily... but unsure how I feel about this acquisition news.
With Xbox's planned "reinvention" under the new CEO, consider the Plex app's days on the console numbered.
Looks like it’s time to cut my TCL-Roku TV off from the internet forever now.
Everyone's finally about to learn why it's dumb as hell to let an app store be built into your display.
Timed my move from Roku devices to Apple TV just right it appears.
Can you get PlutoTV on Apple TV?
According to this[0], yes it's available
[0]: https://support.pluto.tv/s/article/PTV-On-which-devices-can-...
Only a matter of time before enshittification comes for Apple TV.
Are they just following the Succession plot line now?
Seems like an excellent startup opportunity? Build a clean, no-ads streaming stick with open source firmware upstream of the requisite DRM bits and who wouldn't buy one? Almost like what Roku used to be, and the reason we recommended it, for so many years.
Because it will cost 2-4x compared to a Roku, Amazon Fire, or other device sold below cost and subsidized with ad/VC money. And in order to work on the DRMed streaming platforms, you have to play along with the industry. Can't just relabel a random box from Shenzhen, "upstream of the requisite DRM bits" makes no sense.
The original NVIDIA Shield is more than 10 years old at this point and still sells used for around $100 and people are still paying $200 retail for a new 2019 Pro. Interestingly, that price has basically stayed flat at $200 from 2020 to 2026. You can install Lineage or whatever if you don't care about the DRM. It's exactly what HN people want, and that's how much it costs.
Can you clarify the DRM comment? Do streaming services not work or they get downscaled to some garbage resolution?
I am looking for options and being able to sideload on a Shield is attractive, but if the experience is no different than a homemade Linux HTPC, I can save the cash.
No ads on Nvidia shield?
> requisite DRM bits
This is full on Google Play Services certification and more. Ultimately to get the thing that can run/stream Netflix etc the amount of work just isn't viable for the price point people would pay for this.
Also the truth is no investor would touch this on hardware sale income alone, needs some subscription plan at least.
Roku was always a weird one, beloved by people who couldn't stand laggy built in TV interface but doesn't really offer much beyond what TVs come with anyway.
This sounds great to me, but the mainstream market has shown they probably wouldn't pay even $5 more for such a device when something they think is good enough is built into the TV.
Time for Graphene based streaming boxes?
So what are the alternatives?
I have mostly Frame TVs and a projector. I always loved the Roku experience, it really felt like the best media player software, they just kept improving it, and having all TVs on the ecosystem made it even better. One app for virtual remotes, bluetooth listening, searching with your phone keyboard, etc.
I don't want to go back to the Frame's software. I really like the Backdrops app and so many other features.
But it just seems like this acquisition can only accelerate the ensh*tification of Roku. They already changed the default home screen a few weeks ago to show recommendations, SO MANY ads, etc and you change it in settings.
But as other commentors have mentioned, now we'll probably have Fox News and Truth Social front and center whether we want it or not.
So many apps have DRM that prevent you from running it yourself in any way. Is there another way that lets you run Netflix, Paramount+, HBO, all the majors without any trouble that is as integrated as Roku, or at least anything heading in that direction?
> I don't want to go back to the Frame's software
It’s not really a viable option if you wanted to. I have two Frames and they both just keep deteriorating to the point they are pretty useless. I have added an appletv to one of them and it’s vastly improved the UX. Now the only thing I need to do with the Samsung software is the unreasonably slow task of switching inputs.
> So what are the alternatives?
A dumb TV you can buy for cheap on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist with an Nvidia Shield or a similar streaming device running Android.
I can't really see this ending well for the end user, however well it does/doesn't end for the stakeholders.
I thought Roku took off due to their focus on the streaming platform itself, and being agnostic to the streaming services that could be accessed via that platform. Having one specific content producer buy that platform feels like it destroys or devalues the USP of the platform, at least from the point of view of the consumer/end-user.
Or is this just another step in the relentless enshittification of all services?
Wonder what they will do with Howdy, their paid service.
The right wing takeover of media continues unchecked.
I'm going to assume now that Fox will ruin Roku. Any suggestions for replacement devices?
A dumb TV you can buy for cheap on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist with an Nvidia Shield or a similar streaming device running Android.
So now the same corporation that owns Fox News is going to own Roku? No thanks. Guess it's finally time to switch to a custom Android TV box or Apple TV. Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.
They already own Tubi (think Hulu alternative) which I've used when literally no other streaming service had what I was looking for, and is surprisingly decent. I assume this is the beginning of their leap into streaming, wont be surprised if there's other acquisitions that will take place in similar spaces.
Personally I never bought into Roku because I didn't think they'd last very long.
> Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.
I agree, there seem to be no good options for this. You can use Kodi or whatever, but I want something that supports playing my ... totally legally acquired content... and Netflix/Disney/iPlayer/etc. In a package that's silent and low power.
Doesn't seem to exist unfortunately. I guess the closest is Nvidia Shield. You can apparently still sideload APKs onto that... for now. I'll buy one when they release an update. I'm patient!
Yeah, this space seems pretty sparse. Some of the Radxa SBCs are getting closer to a hardware solution for your vision, but there isn't real mainstream software. A self-hosted DNLA server is probably the most realistic option but DNLA has seemed to fall by the wayside in favor of paid streaming and plex/jellyfin.
That said, Tailscale did not exist when DNLA was popular, and DNLA over Tailscale seems a really promising non-jellyfin avenue.
Ultimately the problem will be lack of hardware decoders and poor interop with Dolby, DTS, etc.
https://bret.dk/radxa-dragon-q8b-a-laptop-cosplaying-as-an-s...
If you’re already DIYing, set up a Jellyfin server and then any of the streaming boxes will work.
Jellyfin is great, but it is solving a different problem entirely.
Apple TV.
Fine for Netflix etc. but it's not going to let you run bittorrent or whatever without a lot of pain.
I would not recommend Apple TV. I like the computers and the phone, but the TV is disappoint. Would recommend Nvidia Shield or something.
What I am going to do down the line personally is just buy a gaming laptop and use that. Can play games via Steam and watch stuff via Windows apps (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll).
Only problem of course is the laptop will be pricier, but if someone was going to buy a tv streaming thing AND a gaming system of some kind, probably cheaper.
If you already have a gaming desktop, I can recommend Shield for both. Streaming services work out of the box of course. Then I use Sunshine[1] on my desktop to stream to Moonlight on the Shield. Both have wired ethernet connections. Latency is not noticeable in most cases.
[1]: https://app.lizardbyte.dev/Sunshine/
Nah, gave my desktop to my sister :e
I like the laptop idea, I'd go with Linux instead of Windows, and even then I think it would be a challenge to get it working well with a remote. Nvidia Shield is just Android TV, which means handing Google all your data. Of course, Apple TV means handing Apple all your data, but that seems like maybe the least bad option. I don't know, I'm just tired of all of this shit.
I feel like remote can be convenient, but that I could get by with bluetooth keyboard with a built-in trackpad.
I wonder if it would be possible to operate the computer as a whole with PS5 controller :thinking:
Agree Apple TV is not especially impressive (like, it’s fine, but I especially dislike the remote). I mostly just use my playstation, but there are some apps (criterion being the main one) that are not on the PS, so I use the Apple TV for those
Can you watch stuff from PlayStation though, like Netflix? lol
Yes, it has netflix, hbo, hulu, crunchyroll, etc etc etc. Even Apple TV (the streaming service).
The only thing I use but isn’t on there is criterion.
Shit, maybe I should just get a PlayStation :0
I resisted buying an apple tv for a long time, because I was going to have a playstation either way for games!
The (relatively) poor quality and difficulty of hooking my laptop up to the TV for criterion eventually pushed me to get one just for that, since there’s no word on if criterion has any plans to release an app for PS
As of 10am est their stock is down nearly 20%.
I've always wondered.. Why would a stock (roku in this case) trade below the acquisition price (currently showing around 141)? (160 in this case)
Does the market think this sale won't be approved by the current administration for some reason?
It's a complete betrayal of the user base but I'm sure the CEO will get paid a big buyout so they'll go forward anyway.
Thankfully, I am Roku free.
Where is anti-trust in this country? Absolutely absurd the levels of media consolidation we’re seeing under billionaires right now.
Media consolidation is actively encouraged by the current regime in the US because it lets them have more control.
You have the Trump administration and the Congressional Republicans to thank.
Ok, so now that Roku is dead, what alternatives do we have?
A dumb TV you can buy for cheap on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist with an Nvidia Shield or a similar streaming device running Android.
Also quite interested in this. I guess the best contenders are Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, or roll your own HTPC.
"Somehow, Roku to become even worse."
Further proof that antitrust is dead in the US.
Does this violate US antitrust laws?
If the spirit of the antitrust law is to protect consumers from enshittification, then yes.
But as written to the letter of the law, no, as this would not create a monopoly. More consolidation yes, but a monopoly technically not.
Given that the whole point is to prevent consolidation that is to the detriment of consumers, well, yeah.
yeah, but who's to say Fox is gonna screw up this one?
Like the government saying: "Sorry Fox, you cannot have this one, this one is too good for your dinosaur management."
Since that's a very dangerous government hand meddling, I guess the correct move is to let it happen (to our liking or not).
> yeah, but who's to say Fox is gonna screw up this one?
I mean... gestures widely
WTF? .. yuck
Well, it's been 5 years ... time to switch out my Roku for something better ...
One of the great things about Roku is it's minimal expense ... which means I won't think twice to swap out for anything else.
Also note that this gives Fox News viewership data for all Roku devices!
Powell Memorandum (1971) intensifies, with corporate buy out of all society's core media functions by extremist conservatives radically racing ahead.
Great. Let’s further expand the Murdoch empire. Consolidate, consume, merge, absorb. This never ends poorly for the customer. /s