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.
> 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.
what are the shield issues? I've had 2 of them for 10 years and I haven't noticed anything.
Why is that ironic? This is exactly what you should expect, unless you feel very strongly about sideloading apps or installing different operating systems. Or if you love ads.
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.
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.
The latest remote at least has directional buttons, and I think you can disable the touch part entirely. Might be worth looking into, I think you can buy it separately and it works with most if not all Apple TV's.
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.
My Roku TV (that hasn't been turned on in years, but was left plugged in for years...) literally tries to reach out every minute to home servers. Before u plugging it, I had blocked it's DNS, and was blown away at how frequently it tries to phone home. Easily the noisiest device on my home network.
ever since tvOS came out (and by extension, the app store) they've really leapfrogged every other streaming box. I would have thought android-based boxes like Nvidia's shieldtv would have won here (and created a casual gaming platform) but I was dead wrong.
i worked on a roku tv app once upon a time... and their OS couldn't even draw circle primitives. frustrating.
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.
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
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.
I certainly wouldn't mind being able to block ads on the Apple TV for certain services (by which I mean YouTube), but for services which aren't as aggressively terrible as ad-supported YouTube is, I'm generally fine just making the choice between paying a higher price to go ad-free or putting up with ads. I know some folks are absolutely against all ads no matter what no exceptions, but I'm okay with the notion of "you pay for this by watching ads" if they don't abuse their end of the bargain (by which I mean YouTube).
Also, I watch Nebula on my Apple TV pretty frequently, and Dropout's available there, too.
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 a 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.
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.
Or you buy a non-scammy Onn stick for $20-$30 from Walmart instead, install a launcher like Projectivy/ATV Launcher Pro from Play Store (or Aurora/F-Droid), and either choose your streaming app subscriptions ... or remove them all and install Stremio/Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin etc for your own preferred "alternative" streaming sources via Usenet/Debrid/Torrents/etc.
> it just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites
Not "just". You left out its role as a bot network exit node.
It is also a gateway for "residential proxy networks", AKA botnets for rent.
Which is a decent trade off for unlimited content.
Until authorities show up asking questions about the activity on your IP address.
"I'm willing to make everyone else's life worse for minor personal convenience"
That's the spirit of the age here in America, no? When so many of our leading public figures are hyper-wealthy individuals who are where they're via various sorts of shuffling costs onto others and pocketing profits, is it any surprise when the public seeks to do the same?
It's ultimately utterly destructive, of course. Wish I had a good solution.
Ah, the choice content providers made a few years back that put us all in this situation to begin with - throw constant ads at us for marginal revenue.
Uh ... it's a complete false dichotomy. There is literally no reason you need to participate in a botnet to stream content for free.
This is like saying the included porn malware you got bundled with uTorrent from the first sponsored link on Google is a price worth paying to access The Piratebay, lol.
Why earth would anyone voluntarily advocate for that/defend the malware authors instead of just downloading qBitorrent from Github?!
> just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites
Now you're making it sound even more interesting. What is the name of this device?
“Superbox” I believe.
just use something that you can run a torrent client (and use tpb.party with adblocker). Those apps are malware and botnets.
An android tv you can buy them for 20$, and put any apps
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...
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 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.
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.
They routinely override the user-defined navigation to include whatever new content they are pushing. It was sold as an appliance without ads or subscription. Now it has become an ads platform that the user has less and less control over.
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.