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.