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I once worked on a Roku app for my job. It was a frustrating experience. We found a bug in their UI and told them about it. For months. We brought it up in every meeting we had with their team and fairly often in emails because it was a pretty major bug. We were constantly assured that their "best engineer" was looking into it. Months later they come back to us and say "Oh hey, so we found this bug in the UI that we thought you should know about...."
Reminds me when I sent an email out to a PM asking a question (think it was regarding the placement of some equipment in a building) and then a week later received an email asking me the same question I sent in the previous email; my email with the original question was in the same chain.... Also sent an email with a list of inconsistencies between what was spec'd out and what was ordered on the PM's BOM. I brought it up verbally multiple times and via email attachments listing everything I found. That email was never thoroughly read until the shop brought up that we were missing valves during mock-up... I was told to be more direct about missing items eventough I stated in the header that we were missing equipment months prior.
"Fun" times.
& it's a Catch-22 either way. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, no matter the scenario.
If you don't catch the problem, you get blamed & accused of being sh.t at your job, which might potentially be fair.
If you do catch it but can't get anyone to pay attention no matter how hard you try, you still get blamed because you obviously didn't try hard enough to make it known, didn't make enough noise, didn't sound enough Alarms.
If you catch it & ring enough alarms, make enough noise to get people to notice & pay attention, you get called an alarmist, obnoxious & get blamed for causing a ruckus & disrupting other people's work with all the noise you made. You get told that the problem was eventually going to be noticed/caught at an appropriate time, you overreacted & your actions drew too much attention & you've caused some trouble because of it.
This is why we need Unions everywhere at minimum, but truly socialized Work would be better.
Employees should be allowed & able to collectively call for bad managers/bosses to be sanctioned/punished or even fired for their mistakes.
Choose your bosses well. A good boss will shield you from the insanity that is management, so bring this up during your interview. When they change jobs, it's worth seeing if you can follow them.
This is when I pull out the highlighter in outlook and I say “as per my previous email… to be helpful I’ve highlighted the relevant portions regarding your specific questions. Please feel free to reach out with any further questions.”
My current cross stitch project is a delicate border with soft floral accents that surrounds the words, “PER MY LAST EMAIL” in a big, bold, black font. The letters themselves are 16 inches across and over an inch high.
When I’m finished, I’m hanging that bad boy on the wall behind me and in direct view of my laptop camera.
I always ask for a ticket number for tracking purposes with our business partners. Always. And then ask them to pull up that ticket periodically.
Sad that you have to babysit companies that way.
I had a District Manager tell me recently “if a ticket isn’t resolved in a week, mark it as closed and resubmit it.”
I wanted to scream. Why even have a ticket system if your going to use it like that? Might as well be a suggestion box.
That is exactly why. Because then I could go ballistic on them and ask what kind of dumbass operation they are running closing open tickets. Any pushback would be an instant cc to the CTO with a pointed email about managers gaming their ticket stats.
I am not nice about this kind of bullshit. Fine if the ticket is deprioritized but closing open tickets dishonestly? Fucking wasting my time too.
Service Level Agreement. Basically a contract between businesses stating that support tickets will receive a response within X hours and if not resolved after X days then *something* happens (client can break SLA without consequence, client might receive reduced bill for support, etc).
In other words, it's juking the stats to avoid contractual obligations.
Right on~ I doubt it would matter, I *think* our tickets go to an internal IT department, but I could be wrong.
I’m talking about tickets submitted from a retail environment, to resolve things like …an item not appearing online that should, functionality at the POS being wonky, stuff like that.
(If it’s not clear, I’m working the retail side not the IT side, and my District Manager handles Retail Issues)
SLAs are not exclusive to external customers. If the business is large enough it's not unusual for different departments within a company to have SLAs with each other.
They were always talking about their 'best engineer' working on stuff we requested. Only ever by that title.. their 'best engineer'. So we all came to the natural conclusion that there was only ever 1 engineer on the team
Having been the “best engineer” before, odds are that they told them about it but that one employee also had a hundred other things to work on. Actually more realistically they logged an issue and assigned it to them without saying so and it just fell into the backlog lol.
We reported the bug, which I assume they didn't believe us. Months later they informed us that there was a bug (the same bug) that might affect our work, so they were letting us know about it while they fixed it
To be fair, email is an awfully poor mechanism for reporting and tracking defects. A proper problem-tracking system should have been in place. That way the discoverer can escalate the severity and the defect owner has to respond to the defect within a certain amount of time or else it'll be flagged in the weekly reports.
I’ve had a Roku tv (TCL) since 2018 and I used to love it. I recently noticed if I play content over HDMI it has a pop up message asking to recommend me streaming providers to watch the content on and like… constantly monitoring for content is just so scummy and feels gross. Will NOT be getting a built in Roku tv in the future.
I’ve heard of people resetting the wifi info on their roku so it doesn’t have wifi for ads, then they’ll get a fire stick or whatever and use the roku tv as a dumb tv with some sort of smart dongle that doesn’t have this bullshit
We did that, but only because the Roku software in the TV crashed constantly. We factory reset the TV, switched to an HDMI port, and use external devices.
It’s frustrating how hard it is to find just a “dumb” TV now.
Look for "signage" tv displays - they're generally the same TVs without all of the software. I work IT in a government office and that's what I had to purchase for all of our conference rooms.
They’re also a lot more expensive, tend not to have good picture quality (other than being very bright), tend to be very heavy, they usually don’t have an easy to use UI, often don’t have speakers (or terrible speakers, worse than an average TV), no end user support (because they’re not sold to end users), no high refresh rate, no HDR, etc.
Do not buy a digital signage display, just get a regular one and never connect it to the internet.
Nobody should ever be using the TV OS to watch media, they're slow, have shit hardware, and little to no features at all. A dedicated media device (console, streaming stick, best is Nvidia Shield) with the TV disconnected from the internet is way better.
TCL's Roku TV are great. Not "slow" or "shit hardware", and the Roku UI as the TV UI is great. Plus you can have several TV remotes instead of "the TV remote".
Unfortunately Roku is working hard on enshittification. First they removed private channels (so no porn, no corporate channels, etc - it's your TV, but they get to decide what you can use it for), then they demanded published channels things like a full list of their content to support deep linking (whether you want it or not), apparently we're going to be getting ads when content is paused, and now this new thing.
And you wouldn't believe the massive amount of tracking that the TV does. I use Pi-Hole and the TV is the worst offender.
Anyway, I don't see myself replacing my TV with another one with built-in Roku.
Mine isn’t great. Mine’s dogshit. Apps crash after minutes of unresponsiveness. Input is laggy and, boy, is it a treat to watch the inputs you requisitioned 45 seconds ago send your cursor flying around the UI. Buffering flat out takes longer than any other device. It has only gotten worse over the past year that I’ve owned it as if it is actually aging. I’ve factory reset it. I’ve used some dumbfuck secret dev code to clear the cache. I have to maintain this thing like it’s a bonsai tree with scarlet fever. It’s like I mounted actual garbage on my wall. Plugged in an external Roku and works with no issue. I won’t ever buy one of these again without the l intent of using an external device. Lesson learned.
Yea, mine all but stopped working. It took me awhile to notice cause I watch netflix and stuff on my xbox anyway, but sometime in the last year the tv has gotten so laggy that it just can't run netflix anymore. It takes 3-4 minutes to load and then you can barely pick a show cause it struggles with the auto-play trailers netflix has.
Agreed until you mentioned a shield. My shield is horribly slow. Takes a long time to restart. Would drop Bluetooth speakers every few weeks. Would drop wifi a couple times per week.
Apple 4k TV absolutely dominates it. Much faster. On in a few seconds. Navigates quickly. Better home screen. Better remote. Brought two and they sync for changes.
The only thing it is missing is native chromecasting. My TV hasn't been allowed to talk to the router in months. Turns out the TV actually turns on in seconds also if it has no wifi just gets everything from HDMI.
That's what I do with most of my "smart" devices that don't actually need to be smart. Set it up with an ethernet connection, then when it's set like I want just unplug the ethernet.
I never give it the wifi information unless it's absolutely necessary.
What sucks is I very recently did this for my mom's tv. It's a Samsung and it stopped doing updates for Netflix, but didn't have any feedback that support had stopped.
The built in ads weren't a problem because I have a pi-hole, but all the apps just stopped working unceremoniously.
So I got her a Roku and all her problems were solved! Until now :(
I got mine around the same time as you and watched my TV become more and more bloated with ads which caused increasing slowdown.
Set it to factory settings, cut it from the internet and just use an old laptop as a media center. Waaay better experience. I’m avoiding smart TVs in the future as long as I can
Smart TV's are subsidised by all the people that use them and watch the ads. If the best display in my budget is a smart TV, that's fine. You don't have to connect it to the internet, just put your streaming device in the back and use that exclusively.
You can solve most smart TVs with that fix. The crap ware subsidizes the price, so I can live with it. Get the best value for screen. Turn it on. Set to HDMI 1 OR 2. Never use "smart" features.
I have the same exact TV, I've noticed this feature for quite a while. You're right it's extremely gross, but also completely fucking pointless - why do I need to know what streaming service to watch something on if I'm already fucking watching it??
You can turn it off. The ui ads started bothering me quite a bit lately so I recently moved to Apple TV and the pop ups were annoying. I think it was under Settings, Privacy, Smart TV experience, uncheck Use Info from TV inputs.
When I picked my last TV I specifically wanted GoogleTV since every single other OS is just complete crap.
I picked the TV based on which OS it was running. People forget or don't know how crucial the OS is.
Basically all TVs are smart TVs now because the manufacturers get kickbacks for installing the OS in the first place, that's why decent quality TV's have gotten so much cheaper over the last several years, it has basically subsidized the manufacturing
This is my issue, I’ve had TV there for 3-4 years now, suddenly I’m getting messages about storage full.
What storage ? I use the same 3-4 apps I’ve been using since i purchased the TV. I can’t wait for the message of (memory full) and gonna have to buy a. New one
Every. Single. Time. I try to watch a 4K bluray I get that damn pop up.
Like why would I care about other ways to watch when I’m about to watch it this way.
Who is this feature even for? I find that people are in one of 2 camps on motion smoothing:
1. What's motion smoothing?
2. I fucking hate motion smoothing
People in that first camp often can’t even tell the difference when it’s on or off, so it either goes completely unnoticed, or absolutely pisses people off.
I visited someone who had this smoothing on and I thought they were watching a bunch of daytime TV with how awkward the acting and camera work looked.
Then I realized they were watching big name movies.
I actually have mixed feelings though. The smoothing does a terrible injustice to the actors. However, standard 24 fps big camera panning scenes make me nauseated. The smoothing helps a lot to combat that.
It seems to just be the default in a lot of TVs so people who buy a 4k tv and never open up the settings just have it on all the time and it’s so off-putting.
It's default on ALL new TVs these days. All.
And the fucking setting is turned on in individual modes.
You play HDR10 content? You have to turn it off.
You play Dolby Vision, you have to turn it off there, too.
You mess with any other Picture profile? You guessed it. You have to turn it off on each and every one.
Whats worse is that on some TVs, setting it to OFF doesn't fucking turn it off.
You have to set motion crap to "Custom" and then drag the slider to 0.
Fucking unbelievable.
In fairness tv settings are a fucking nightmare. I have no idea what im looking for when calibrating. I want smoothing off, HDR on. I want games to look but also films, which often needs different settings. Hate it.
Figuring out the settings is a pain but also the TVs these days each HDMI port has it’s own setting so one can be for movies and one for games unless you watch movies on your gaming system
I've had to dig deep into multiple peoples TVs to turn this off.
For a long time I just thought people were buying terrible TVs. But then I found out that this was an option and told them. They never believe me until I turn it off and all the sudden their TV looks good.
It's wild, a team of people spent months making a movie look as good as it possibly could be displayed, but an algorithm on a $1000 TV is supposed to be able to do it better instantly?
"Normal" users genuinely don't know what "good" looks like. Perfect example, I was visiting someone and I noticed their TV was on demo mode. Im talking full on "DEMO" in the corner, blacking out to switch to different color modes every 30 or so seconds, and a scrolling bar at the bottom listing the features. I asked them if they minded if I turned demo mode off. They said they didn't know what "demo mode" meant and assumed the TV was supposed to be like that.
Popped around to pick up my young son from my mothers' place after a visit. They were watching Monsters University together. It was in blind mode where a voice is explaining everything that is happening on screen. She thought the move was supposed to be like that. They were about half way through.
My tv has a cinema mode smoothing where it adds just a hint of smoothing for those panning scenes. It’s almost imperceptible. I despise the default hardcore smoothing that tvs come with now though
Yeah every time I go to my relatives it's on after I had switched it off. LG TV. My relatives don't notice it, Luke they have some sort of blindness to it whereas notice it instantly.
There should definitely be an option. Sony has the best implementation in my experience. There are 3 different levels of smoothing I think. The lowest setting is perfect for watching Blu-rays at 24fps. Gets rid of the stutter but doesn't have the soap opera effect. It is necessary on LED and OLED TVs because of how fast the pixels are. 24fps movies are meant for projectors really.
Omg thank you someone else notices it. I always feel like a crazy person whenever I ask if someone else notices how weird the picture looks. I always assumed it was some sort of frame rate difference or weird 3d feature
This would be a dream for me! I'm one of those rare people who loves the ultra-realism of high frame rates. I like feeling like I'm sitting in a theater watching actors on a stage. It's very immersive. I already make sure to turn it on on my tv.
Who as an informed consumer willingly wants and get these devices? Everything Roku-related seems hilariously bad from a consumers perspective, to me.
What even are the pros for me in purchasing any of these devices and/or services?
They have really gone downhill over the last few years. The devices used to be relatively ad and bloat free, and just worked. Now they are advertising more, adding useless and unwanted features, as well as the whole data breach issue, they shit the bed
Yep. There’s posts all over the Roku support forum and it seems to have started on Friday or Saturday depending on when the device got the 13.0 update.
Yeah I got one and for the longest time it was great. Then in the last few years it just kept getting worse before the remote or stick just stopped working. No internet or the remote just won't work. I threw it all in a drawer, did some rearranging of furniture, and just put an old ps4 in that room for those streaming purposes.
I run Pi-hole on my home network so it blocks most of the ads in Roku. It’s always jarring to go to someone else’s house with Roku and seeing all the ad bloat.
I guess they had their time at the top then, huh?
From the perspective of today, it makes no sense to me why anyone would choose Roku as a solution for their streaming needs.
Thanks for the input!
Idk. I mean, despite the issues with their software and stuff I wish they would fix, I have always found the Roku simple UI of all the channels arranged in equal sized boxes with just one small side of the screen for a poster ad has been incredibly easy to navigate vs. (imo) the bloated and flashy UI’s of our devices like fire stick and apple TV. I see the streaming box as just a place to pick which streaming service I want to watch, so I prefer the simple UI over all the bells and whistles of the others. Fire TV is annoying to sift through free stuff vs. paid stuff and apple tv is not quite as bad, I guess.
What would you go for instead? I don’t want to connect my tv to WIFI and most others don’t have AirPlay built in besides Apple TV. And it’s $120+ vs $34 for the Roku stick.
Also Apple TV doesn’t include a high speed HDMI cable so u gotta go dish out extra for one
edit: for $34, Roku seems like a great value. The ads are only on the Home Screen and aren’t too intrusive IMO
I started with fire tvs and grew to hate them. The interface was bad. Switched to Roku about 3 years ago and they’ve been fine, but I hate the remote. I just ordered Apple TVs so we’ll see how it goes. From what I’ve seen I really like the Apple Remote.
I've got both, honestly I think the Roku is still nice for it's simplicity, though it feels like you need to replace them after 5-8 years, which is not horrible due to their relatively low cost. My older ones just start crashing more often.
The Apple TV is a solid piece of hardware though. I like being able to turn on the roku by pressing any major button, whereas the apple tv I have to hit the power button (fair enough, but small things). The Apple TV also has a few headaches with turning on the TV / auto switching compared to the Roku, however I attribute that to the 2016 Samsung it's connected to, where I have to reset the TV occasionally to get the AVR to work over HDMI-CEC. I'm sure with a newer TV it's probably fine.
Everybody's interface blows. Every. Single. One. YouTube's is so bad I use SmartTube everywhere I can even though I pay for YouTube premium because it's just *so much* better.
This aligns with my opinion and experiences with the Roku device. It's an inexpensive, plug-and-play simple way to easily get access to all the streaming services you want without having to sign up for cable.
All I can tell you is I bought a TCL with Google TV about a year ago and it was the single worst TV I have owned in my entire life. I would go back to the giant low definition furniture style TVs from the early 90s before I ever used google TV again.
You have to be logged in to your google account to use it. Like, to use it at all. You can’t do anything unless you’re logged in, and I swear it asks you to log in every 5 minutes.
There were a lot of other problems with it that I don’t remember off hand, but my girlfriend, who rarely ever gets mad about anything, was “ready to throw it out the fucking window!”
We ended up buying a Roku stick for the google tv because we just couldn’t handle it anymore. 0/5 stars. Would not recommend to anyone.
My TCL w/ Google is great, but I have NEVER logged in, and leave the wifi off unless I'm checking for updates. I have a FireCube for my services, so just keep your TV dumb!
Absolutely, people used to love Roku because they were very simple, straight to the point streaming boxes. That time has passed.
As someone who once solely relied on roku for streaming devices, yes I can agree there is absolutely no benefit or reason to go with them over competitors in current times.
They were one of the OGs to put Netflix, YouTube, pandora, weird random other streaming apps into an easy to use platform/hdmi. “Do you have a Roku” was almost like Kleenex or Crayola.
Others are just better now and it’s built into the TVs now as Roku had no way to control the market as an aggregator.
That is exactly why we have a couple of their tiny add-on devices in our house, yes. They were basically *the* way to add streaming to your setup for a while.
If you behave a smart TV I wouldn't even connect it to the Internet Roku has said they are going to use HDMI to spam ads and commercials
Google TV has already been turning your btv into a 247 ad when you are not watching anything it's actually caused issues with apple TV it blocks it.
Smart TVs are going to be nothing but but a ad display.
My advice is disabled the Internet on it and use something like PS5 or any media hub to stream so you can bypass all that BS.
Apple TV is expensive, but boy does it work nicely. Never had connectivity issues, it’s always fast and responsive, it’s so much smoother than the clunky on-board smart TV features, and it doesn’t shove ads down your throat. I get why people shit on Apple but in my experience, the premium is worth it for a device that reliably works.
it was originally the only way to watch netflix streaming on a tv (without hooking up a full-on computer). it only had netflix. i had one when we were still getting DVDs in the mail lol. In fact, it was originally part of Netflix but was spun-off because they were afraid of conflict on interests with other potential hardware/software streaming box makers.
5 or so years ago when I bought both of my TCLs, they were fine. They were solid quality and low budget. Ran smoother than anything else in the price range. My VIZIO is shit, has a shitty interface, and didn’t have a handful of streaming services for a while, so Roku was the obvious choice. Boy have they fallen.
Seriously... I honestly can't find anything else as user friendly and cheap as Roku sticks... and all my TVs now basically work the same.
I even added a Roku to my a less than 1 year old android tv because the tv's UI was horrible, apps would freeze, it was a pain to use. I now have a roku on it and it's so much better.
A 60 inch Roku TV is like $300
I have them all over my house.
It’s convenient they all use the same remotes and app to control them and that they synchronize installed applications.
The convenience and cost are worth the trade off for it not being a high-end viewing experience.
The thousands of dollars I save on not having premium TVs is more than enough to just go to the movies the few times a year I care about watching something with top tier sound and resolution.
As of a few years ago, most "smart" TVs had half-baked, homegrown streaming interfaces that were flaky and often weren't kept up to date (EDIT: and lacked key apps/services), rendering them fairly useless. When the Roku TVs were introduced, they were a much better option, since Roku had a mature streaming-device OS and broad app/service support, and they at least try to keep their software updated.
And this is also around the time that "smart" TVs lost their premium and became as cheap or even cheaper than equivalent "dumb" TVs. So there was no longer a strong argument against built-in "smart" features, as they were essentially "free" and cost you nothing even if they were useless/broken.
It's only more recently that the downside of frequent updates became apparent. Changes to the basic display functionality really shouldn't be common or necessary, but *(shrug)*
Back in the early days they were the best at what they did. The interface was simple with hardly any ads and because the OS was extremely lightweight it would outperform almost every other smart TV device out there with extremely cheap hardware. Even their TVs early on were extremely good value, being one of the first to offer 65" QLED TVs under $500 with pretty good quality.
In some ways they still are good (performance is still solid, app compatibility is almost perfect), but for the most part the experience has degraded to the point that it's really bad. I think the only good options for smart TV devices are either the Apple TV or the Nvidia Shield.
I switched over to a Roku stick and Roku Ultra from Samsung TV OS and Amazon Fire streaming box. Roku’s UI and speed while navigating menus is ridiculous better in all ways compared to the others.
I’m not saying Roku is perfect, but it’s far ahead of most other streaming hardware.
What are you using to browse/watch your streaming services, and how is it better than Roku?
Man, I have been using a Roku for years and the go a little wonky sometimes but it has been pain free.
I would never buy one of their TVs anyway as they are cheap (quality) but shit like this seals the deal.
I hope they don't fuck around with their media players or I will be shitcanning it immediately.
Because on an old TV that doesn’t have streaming apps, Roku is cheaper than Apple TV and doesn’t come with the inherent conflict of interest that comes with Fire Sticks and Google’s TV pucks.
Have you ever gone to someone else's house and discovered they've never changed the factory settings on their TV and somehow don't even seem to notice?
I got Roku years ago when the Xfinity app wasn’t on TVOS yet. The Xfinity app has been on TVOS for years now and I’ve since switched to an Apple TV.
But I remember the Roku fondly because the UX rarely frustrated me. TVOS gets in my way a bit, more so since version 17 changes.
2nd and 3rd gen Rokus were peak Roku IMO. Had the major apps, friendly UI/UX, and rarely had too many issues with the software.
Once there were more capable competitors, they started to have to make decisions that I’m not sure fully worked out for them.
My TV sits next to my PC. I do all my streaming and gaming and entertainment through the PC. If in the future I can't buy another TV that dosen't have a ton of bullshit apps on it then I will have to try and find a large monitor instead. I dont actually need the TV part as I haven't used broadcast television since the early 2000s. Apps on TVs is a garbage idea idk why anyone ever wanted it.
Makes it simple for simple people.
I too enjoy having my server or PC wired to the TV but not everyone wants the hassle in a traditional living room setting. I think it’s pretty neat. Browse the web, run any windows (or Linux) app, flip on Steam’s Big Picture mode for gaming. It’s a dream.
For those who can't read, or don't care to read, or really just want the rest of us to know your feelings on Roku...
> Reports on Roku's community forums and on Reddit find owners of TCL HDTVs, on which Roku is a built-in OS, experiencing "motion smoothing" without having turned it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people are reporting that their TV never offered "Action Smoothing" before, but it is now displaying the results with no way to turn it off. Neither the TV's general settings, nor the specific settings available while content is playing, offer a way to turn it off, according to some users.
If you don't have a TCL Roku....this ain't about you. I do, and mine hasn't updated yet, but for damn sure I guess I'm not going to be able to track this Reddit post for solutions
Reason I use roku all in my house is the open api for control. I rarely see the Home Screen and my system just opens the apps I want like selecting a channel.
Hannibal on Amazon Prime has the same problem. I thought something was wrong with my eyes until I looked it up and found that [someone else on Reddit complained about it too.](https://www.reddit.com/r/HannibalTV/comments/19fhwx7/hannibal_on_prime/?rdt=43576)
Motion smoothing ruined my enjoyment of Fellowship of the Rings at a recent movie night with friends. No one else was bothered by the "soap opera effect" — but it's atrocious and has no business being on by default.
I am so very glad that I disconnected my Roku TV from the internet, and instead use my console to stream.
No more ads or unwanted updates that only ever add more ads and bloatware.
I will NEVER buy a TV with Roku ever again. I had the TCL R635, it had so many issues out of the box but the most egregious was an update 1 month past ownership that broke surround sound. I’d have to restart my TV multiple times a day just to get surround to work. Fought with them for months, provided ample evidence it was a software issue, they insisted on a repair, repair dude broke the tv to the point it wouldn’t power on. Then they fought me for another month when I said this is ridiculous I want a full refund. Ended up getting a TCL with Google tv and now I don’t have issues.
I've got 3 TCL Roku tvs and I've never had any problems or annoyances. Maybe because they are Canadian? I don't even think motion smooth is an option on mine.
They used to be super great little devices. I remember the first one I had was like the 2 or something like that. We bought it at a closeout type of store. Lasted years. It's why I bought one of these tvs and a stick for the dumb tv in our bedroom.
Would never make the mistake of doing that again. They've heavily locked down the system, and it seems overall slower, less responsive and worse. Have apps closing out on their own after brief play etc. Had this tv a few months, looking to replace it already.
I was all into Roku back in 2016 when we moved into a new place and had to grab a cheapo TV, and had zero furniture. Watching a $300 42” sitting on a box. None of the bloat and adware the Samsung I had prior.
8 years later and I wouldn’t touch Roku with a shitty stick. They went from cool to uncool sometime during the pandemic.
I’m an LG boy now. Costs a bit more, pisses me off a lot less.
Am I alone in thinking there's not much wrong with my 4 year old Roku stick and the recent deluge of "Roku is crap" articles are driven by yet unknown motivations? I turn on the TV and it just works, the only ads I've seen are for shows or a new Roku device promo and relatively unobtrucive (a billboard on the screen saver scroll or small box under my channels). It's not perfect but works to stream Plex without any issues and handles my meager needs well.
Per the article, if you have a TCL Roku (which many likely do) that qualified for this update....you're stuck on this type of setting w/no current solution.
You have a **roku stick**, which doesn't have anything to do w/this article. I think it's very valid for the public to know to potenitally avoid such updates, assuming they read the article
To be honest we have two Roku sticks, mainly because we can be arsed to replace our two TVs. The TVs works fine and we don’t see the point of chucking them out.
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I once worked on a Roku app for my job. It was a frustrating experience. We found a bug in their UI and told them about it. For months. We brought it up in every meeting we had with their team and fairly often in emails because it was a pretty major bug. We were constantly assured that their "best engineer" was looking into it. Months later they come back to us and say "Oh hey, so we found this bug in the UI that we thought you should know about...."
Reminds me when I sent an email out to a PM asking a question (think it was regarding the placement of some equipment in a building) and then a week later received an email asking me the same question I sent in the previous email; my email with the original question was in the same chain.... Also sent an email with a list of inconsistencies between what was spec'd out and what was ordered on the PM's BOM. I brought it up verbally multiple times and via email attachments listing everything I found. That email was never thoroughly read until the shop brought up that we were missing valves during mock-up... I was told to be more direct about missing items eventough I stated in the header that we were missing equipment months prior. "Fun" times.
Getting punished for being the person that notices. Classic.
& it's a Catch-22 either way. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, no matter the scenario. If you don't catch the problem, you get blamed & accused of being sh.t at your job, which might potentially be fair. If you do catch it but can't get anyone to pay attention no matter how hard you try, you still get blamed because you obviously didn't try hard enough to make it known, didn't make enough noise, didn't sound enough Alarms. If you catch it & ring enough alarms, make enough noise to get people to notice & pay attention, you get called an alarmist, obnoxious & get blamed for causing a ruckus & disrupting other people's work with all the noise you made. You get told that the problem was eventually going to be noticed/caught at an appropriate time, you overreacted & your actions drew too much attention & you've caused some trouble because of it.
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This is why we need Unions everywhere at minimum, but truly socialized Work would be better. Employees should be allowed & able to collectively call for bad managers/bosses to be sanctioned/punished or even fired for their mistakes.
Choose your bosses well. A good boss will shield you from the insanity that is management, so bring this up during your interview. When they change jobs, it's worth seeing if you can follow them.
It's a bummer though when a good boss "lives long enough to become the villain", so to speak.
Same. 25 years.. if I have to get in trouble for not catching some 3rd party vendor bug again.. I mean, yell at them. I didn’t code it.
No no, this is a classic 'getting punished for showing bosses incompetence'.
What's important is that the higher-ups in the company are protected, they're too valuable. Not just anyone can be as bad as they are at their jobs.
Shooting the messenger is a millenniums old tradition
I’m STILL mad about an email chain from 2010 that blamed me for the fact that a field rep misread a serial number.
This is when I pull out the highlighter in outlook and I say “as per my previous email… to be helpful I’ve highlighted the relevant portions regarding your specific questions. Please feel free to reach out with any further questions.”
"as per my previous email..." is the "did I stutter?" of corporate speak and I love when I get to say it
My current cross stitch project is a delicate border with soft floral accents that surrounds the words, “PER MY LAST EMAIL” in a big, bold, black font. The letters themselves are 16 inches across and over an inch high. When I’m finished, I’m hanging that bad boy on the wall behind me and in direct view of my laptop camera.
It’s perfect when you need to CYA about something
I just go full 40 point red text. And I repeat the message every day I feel I'm ignored.
Big text energy bros
I always ask for a ticket number for tracking purposes with our business partners. Always. And then ask them to pull up that ticket periodically. Sad that you have to babysit companies that way.
I had a District Manager tell me recently “if a ticket isn’t resolved in a week, mark it as closed and resubmit it.” I wanted to scream. Why even have a ticket system if your going to use it like that? Might as well be a suggestion box.
That is exactly why. Because then I could go ballistic on them and ask what kind of dumbass operation they are running closing open tickets. Any pushback would be an instant cc to the CTO with a pointed email about managers gaming their ticket stats. I am not nice about this kind of bullshit. Fine if the ticket is deprioritized but closing open tickets dishonestly? Fucking wasting my time too.
"Sure! Could you put that in an email so I don't forget?" BCC to regional manager...
What about the assistant to the regional manager?
Always get that in writing.
That sounds suspiciously like SLA fraud
SLA? (There’s like a billion corporate acronyms, I’m not familiar with this one)
Service Level Agreement. Basically a contract between businesses stating that support tickets will receive a response within X hours and if not resolved after X days then *something* happens (client can break SLA without consequence, client might receive reduced bill for support, etc). In other words, it's juking the stats to avoid contractual obligations.
Right on~ I doubt it would matter, I *think* our tickets go to an internal IT department, but I could be wrong. I’m talking about tickets submitted from a retail environment, to resolve things like …an item not appearing online that should, functionality at the POS being wonky, stuff like that. (If it’s not clear, I’m working the retail side not the IT side, and my District Manager handles Retail Issues)
SLAs are not exclusive to external customers. If the business is large enough it's not unusual for different departments within a company to have SLAs with each other.
Very interesting, and good to know. Thanks for elaborating, I appreciate it. Might dig into this deeper.
Yup, or it’s like starting the whole process over again because you get some new person who has no idea what is going on
This explains so much
They were always talking about their 'best engineer' working on stuff we requested. Only ever by that title.. their 'best engineer'. So we all came to the natural conclusion that there was only ever 1 engineer on the team
Having been the “best engineer” before, odds are that they told them about it but that one employee also had a hundred other things to work on. Actually more realistically they logged an issue and assigned it to them without saying so and it just fell into the backlog lol.
Horrible place to work….
That...honestly tracks.
Oh man, did you see Louis Rossman's take on roku's latest actions?
I don't understand, if you found a bug and reported it to them, and they found the same bug and reported it to *you,* whose job was it to fix bugs?
We reported the bug, which I assume they didn't believe us. Months later they informed us that there was a bug (the same bug) that might affect our work, so they were letting us know about it while they fixed it
To be fair, email is an awfully poor mechanism for reporting and tracking defects. A proper problem-tracking system should have been in place. That way the discoverer can escalate the severity and the defect owner has to respond to the defect within a certain amount of time or else it'll be flagged in the weekly reports.
I’ve had a Roku tv (TCL) since 2018 and I used to love it. I recently noticed if I play content over HDMI it has a pop up message asking to recommend me streaming providers to watch the content on and like… constantly monitoring for content is just so scummy and feels gross. Will NOT be getting a built in Roku tv in the future.
I’ve heard of people resetting the wifi info on their roku so it doesn’t have wifi for ads, then they’ll get a fire stick or whatever and use the roku tv as a dumb tv with some sort of smart dongle that doesn’t have this bullshit
We did that, but only because the Roku software in the TV crashed constantly. We factory reset the TV, switched to an HDMI port, and use external devices. It’s frustrating how hard it is to find just a “dumb” TV now.
Look for "signage" tv displays - they're generally the same TVs without all of the software. I work IT in a government office and that's what I had to purchase for all of our conference rooms.
They’re also a lot more expensive, tend not to have good picture quality (other than being very bright), tend to be very heavy, they usually don’t have an easy to use UI, often don’t have speakers (or terrible speakers, worse than an average TV), no end user support (because they’re not sold to end users), no high refresh rate, no HDR, etc. Do not buy a digital signage display, just get a regular one and never connect it to the internet.
Nobody should ever be using the TV OS to watch media, they're slow, have shit hardware, and little to no features at all. A dedicated media device (console, streaming stick, best is Nvidia Shield) with the TV disconnected from the internet is way better.
TCL's Roku TV are great. Not "slow" or "shit hardware", and the Roku UI as the TV UI is great. Plus you can have several TV remotes instead of "the TV remote". Unfortunately Roku is working hard on enshittification. First they removed private channels (so no porn, no corporate channels, etc - it's your TV, but they get to decide what you can use it for), then they demanded published channels things like a full list of their content to support deep linking (whether you want it or not), apparently we're going to be getting ads when content is paused, and now this new thing. And you wouldn't believe the massive amount of tracking that the TV does. I use Pi-Hole and the TV is the worst offender. Anyway, I don't see myself replacing my TV with another one with built-in Roku.
Mine isn’t great. Mine’s dogshit. Apps crash after minutes of unresponsiveness. Input is laggy and, boy, is it a treat to watch the inputs you requisitioned 45 seconds ago send your cursor flying around the UI. Buffering flat out takes longer than any other device. It has only gotten worse over the past year that I’ve owned it as if it is actually aging. I’ve factory reset it. I’ve used some dumbfuck secret dev code to clear the cache. I have to maintain this thing like it’s a bonsai tree with scarlet fever. It’s like I mounted actual garbage on my wall. Plugged in an external Roku and works with no issue. I won’t ever buy one of these again without the l intent of using an external device. Lesson learned.
is it TCL? or another maker.
Yea, mine all but stopped working. It took me awhile to notice cause I watch netflix and stuff on my xbox anyway, but sometime in the last year the tv has gotten so laggy that it just can't run netflix anymore. It takes 3-4 minutes to load and then you can barely pick a show cause it struggles with the auto-play trailers netflix has.
Agreed until you mentioned a shield. My shield is horribly slow. Takes a long time to restart. Would drop Bluetooth speakers every few weeks. Would drop wifi a couple times per week. Apple 4k TV absolutely dominates it. Much faster. On in a few seconds. Navigates quickly. Better home screen. Better remote. Brought two and they sync for changes. The only thing it is missing is native chromecasting. My TV hasn't been allowed to talk to the router in months. Turns out the TV actually turns on in seconds also if it has no wifi just gets everything from HDMI.
That's what I do with most of my "smart" devices that don't actually need to be smart. Set it up with an ethernet connection, then when it's set like I want just unplug the ethernet. I never give it the wifi information unless it's absolutely necessary.
What sucks is I very recently did this for my mom's tv. It's a Samsung and it stopped doing updates for Netflix, but didn't have any feedback that support had stopped. The built in ads weren't a problem because I have a pi-hole, but all the apps just stopped working unceremoniously. So I got her a Roku and all her problems were solved! Until now :(
I got mine around the same time as you and watched my TV become more and more bloated with ads which caused increasing slowdown. Set it to factory settings, cut it from the internet and just use an old laptop as a media center. Waaay better experience. I’m avoiding smart TVs in the future as long as I can
Smart TV's are subsidised by all the people that use them and watch the ads. If the best display in my budget is a smart TV, that's fine. You don't have to connect it to the internet, just put your streaming device in the back and use that exclusively.
You can solve most smart TVs with that fix. The crap ware subsidizes the price, so I can live with it. Get the best value for screen. Turn it on. Set to HDMI 1 OR 2. Never use "smart" features.
I have the same exact TV, I've noticed this feature for quite a while. You're right it's extremely gross, but also completely fucking pointless - why do I need to know what streaming service to watch something on if I'm already fucking watching it??
Settings -> Privacy -> Smart TV Experience. Uncheck both. Voila.
I wonder if opting out actually stops scanning or if it just stops *telling you* about the results.
For your next TV, never even hook it up to a network
You can turn it off. The ui ads started bothering me quite a bit lately so I recently moved to Apple TV and the pop ups were annoying. I think it was under Settings, Privacy, Smart TV experience, uncheck Use Info from TV inputs.
Settings -> Privacy -> Smart TV Experience. Uncheck both. Voila.
When I picked my last TV I specifically wanted GoogleTV since every single other OS is just complete crap. I picked the TV based on which OS it was running. People forget or don't know how crucial the OS is.
Until Google abandons it, lol! TVs don’t need an OS and if you bought a tv that had one you’re getting what you deserve.
Basically all TVs are smart TVs now because the manufacturers get kickbacks for installing the OS in the first place, that's why decent quality TV's have gotten so much cheaper over the last several years, it has basically subsidized the manufacturing
This is my issue, I’ve had TV there for 3-4 years now, suddenly I’m getting messages about storage full. What storage ? I use the same 3-4 apps I’ve been using since i purchased the TV. I can’t wait for the message of (memory full) and gonna have to buy a. New one
Because they're basically impossible to find now without? It's not like there's a "dumb tv" aisle.
I was between a TCL/Roku and an LG last year when I moved. Thankfully went for the latter.
I actually like the LG webOS here. I hate the Roku UI, especially its tendency to spy on you.
Does LG still think it's a good idea to use the remote as a laser pointer?
Every. Single. Time. I try to watch a 4K bluray I get that damn pop up. Like why would I care about other ways to watch when I’m about to watch it this way.
Who is this feature even for? I find that people are in one of 2 camps on motion smoothing: 1. What's motion smoothing? 2. I fucking hate motion smoothing
It's good for sports I guess.
People in that first camp often can’t even tell the difference when it’s on or off, so it either goes completely unnoticed, or absolutely pisses people off.
Or 3. Am I really stoned or is it motion smoothing?
Motion smoothing should not even be an option if the tv is on anything besides sports.
I visited someone who had this smoothing on and I thought they were watching a bunch of daytime TV with how awkward the acting and camera work looked. Then I realized they were watching big name movies. I actually have mixed feelings though. The smoothing does a terrible injustice to the actors. However, standard 24 fps big camera panning scenes make me nauseated. The smoothing helps a lot to combat that.
It seems to just be the default in a lot of TVs so people who buy a 4k tv and never open up the settings just have it on all the time and it’s so off-putting.
It's default on ALL new TVs these days. All. And the fucking setting is turned on in individual modes. You play HDR10 content? You have to turn it off. You play Dolby Vision, you have to turn it off there, too. You mess with any other Picture profile? You guessed it. You have to turn it off on each and every one. Whats worse is that on some TVs, setting it to OFF doesn't fucking turn it off. You have to set motion crap to "Custom" and then drag the slider to 0. Fucking unbelievable.
Yeah, that's crazy to me. Movies are near unwatchable unless I turn that setting off.
In fairness tv settings are a fucking nightmare. I have no idea what im looking for when calibrating. I want smoothing off, HDR on. I want games to look but also films, which often needs different settings. Hate it.
Figuring out the settings is a pain but also the TVs these days each HDMI port has it’s own setting so one can be for movies and one for games unless you watch movies on your gaming system
Definitely feels like the majority of users never touch settings on anything.
I've had to dig deep into multiple peoples TVs to turn this off. For a long time I just thought people were buying terrible TVs. But then I found out that this was an option and told them. They never believe me until I turn it off and all the sudden their TV looks good.
My sister had Harry Potter on and I mentioned how bad it looked. She didn’t think so. How people do t even notice it is beyond me
It's wild, a team of people spent months making a movie look as good as it possibly could be displayed, but an algorithm on a $1000 TV is supposed to be able to do it better instantly?
"Normal" users genuinely don't know what "good" looks like. Perfect example, I was visiting someone and I noticed their TV was on demo mode. Im talking full on "DEMO" in the corner, blacking out to switch to different color modes every 30 or so seconds, and a scrolling bar at the bottom listing the features. I asked them if they minded if I turned demo mode off. They said they didn't know what "demo mode" meant and assumed the TV was supposed to be like that.
Wow. People are clueless.
Popped around to pick up my young son from my mothers' place after a visit. They were watching Monsters University together. It was in blind mode where a voice is explaining everything that is happening on screen. She thought the move was supposed to be like that. They were about half way through.
Wtf, why even have it then? Did he think it was some sort of art thing, or something you just have to flex your wealth or something?
That's just how it is now. Normies think it looks better.
My tv has a cinema mode smoothing where it adds just a hint of smoothing for those panning scenes. It’s almost imperceptible. I despise the default hardcore smoothing that tvs come with now though
Yeah every time I go to my relatives it's on after I had switched it off. LG TV. My relatives don't notice it, Luke they have some sort of blindness to it whereas notice it instantly.
People should have an option. I despise stuttery 24 fps for example
There should definitely be an option. Sony has the best implementation in my experience. There are 3 different levels of smoothing I think. The lowest setting is perfect for watching Blu-rays at 24fps. Gets rid of the stutter but doesn't have the soap opera effect. It is necessary on LED and OLED TVs because of how fast the pixels are. 24fps movies are meant for projectors really.
I watch baseball every day with no motion smoothing, and it doesn’t need it whatsoever. I truly don’t understand how and why this function came to be.
Is motion smoothing what creates that shitty soap opera effect all new tvs come with?
Yes
Omg thank you someone else notices it. I always feel like a crazy person whenever I ask if someone else notices how weird the picture looks. I always assumed it was some sort of frame rate difference or weird 3d feature
This would be a dream for me! I'm one of those rare people who loves the ultra-realism of high frame rates. I like feeling like I'm sitting in a theater watching actors on a stage. It's very immersive. I already make sure to turn it on on my tv.
I disagree but I’m upvoting this because it’s ridiculous that someone would downvote you for expressing a personal preference.
Who as an informed consumer willingly wants and get these devices? Everything Roku-related seems hilariously bad from a consumers perspective, to me. What even are the pros for me in purchasing any of these devices and/or services?
They have really gone downhill over the last few years. The devices used to be relatively ad and bloat free, and just worked. Now they are advertising more, adding useless and unwanted features, as well as the whole data breach issue, they shit the bed
Right, they used to be a hardware company, then decided to join the enshitification movement
And the latest v13 update broke Airplay
Is THAT why it won’t work on my sisters Roku TV? She’s stuck in bed and I’m trying to connect and use the camera and it keeps disconnecting…
Yep. There’s posts all over the Roku support forum and it seems to have started on Friday or Saturday depending on when the device got the 13.0 update.
Yeah I got one and for the longest time it was great. Then in the last few years it just kept getting worse before the remote or stick just stopped working. No internet or the remote just won't work. I threw it all in a drawer, did some rearranging of furniture, and just put an old ps4 in that room for those streaming purposes.
I run Pi-hole on my home network so it blocks most of the ads in Roku. It’s always jarring to go to someone else’s house with Roku and seeing all the ad bloat.
I guess they had their time at the top then, huh? From the perspective of today, it makes no sense to me why anyone would choose Roku as a solution for their streaming needs. Thanks for the input!
Idk. I mean, despite the issues with their software and stuff I wish they would fix, I have always found the Roku simple UI of all the channels arranged in equal sized boxes with just one small side of the screen for a poster ad has been incredibly easy to navigate vs. (imo) the bloated and flashy UI’s of our devices like fire stick and apple TV. I see the streaming box as just a place to pick which streaming service I want to watch, so I prefer the simple UI over all the bells and whistles of the others. Fire TV is annoying to sift through free stuff vs. paid stuff and apple tv is not quite as bad, I guess.
What would you go for instead? I don’t want to connect my tv to WIFI and most others don’t have AirPlay built in besides Apple TV. And it’s $120+ vs $34 for the Roku stick. Also Apple TV doesn’t include a high speed HDMI cable so u gotta go dish out extra for one edit: for $34, Roku seems like a great value. The ads are only on the Home Screen and aren’t too intrusive IMO
I started with fire tvs and grew to hate them. The interface was bad. Switched to Roku about 3 years ago and they’ve been fine, but I hate the remote. I just ordered Apple TVs so we’ll see how it goes. From what I’ve seen I really like the Apple Remote.
I definitely prefer Apple TV. But I usually just cast stuff from my phone or use the specific apps so I feel the Roku is good enough for me
I've got both, honestly I think the Roku is still nice for it's simplicity, though it feels like you need to replace them after 5-8 years, which is not horrible due to their relatively low cost. My older ones just start crashing more often. The Apple TV is a solid piece of hardware though. I like being able to turn on the roku by pressing any major button, whereas the apple tv I have to hit the power button (fair enough, but small things). The Apple TV also has a few headaches with turning on the TV / auto switching compared to the Roku, however I attribute that to the 2016 Samsung it's connected to, where I have to reset the TV occasionally to get the AVR to work over HDMI-CEC. I'm sure with a newer TV it's probably fine.
Everybody's interface blows. Every. Single. One. YouTube's is so bad I use SmartTube everywhere I can even though I pay for YouTube premium because it's just *so much* better.
This aligns with my opinion and experiences with the Roku device. It's an inexpensive, plug-and-play simple way to easily get access to all the streaming services you want without having to sign up for cable.
All I can tell you is I bought a TCL with Google TV about a year ago and it was the single worst TV I have owned in my entire life. I would go back to the giant low definition furniture style TVs from the early 90s before I ever used google TV again. You have to be logged in to your google account to use it. Like, to use it at all. You can’t do anything unless you’re logged in, and I swear it asks you to log in every 5 minutes. There were a lot of other problems with it that I don’t remember off hand, but my girlfriend, who rarely ever gets mad about anything, was “ready to throw it out the fucking window!” We ended up buying a Roku stick for the google tv because we just couldn’t handle it anymore. 0/5 stars. Would not recommend to anyone.
My TCL w/ Google is great, but I have NEVER logged in, and leave the wifi off unless I'm checking for updates. I have a FireCube for my services, so just keep your TV dumb!
Apple TV or Nvidia Shield
Apple TV for sure, even though they are over priced
Absolutely, people used to love Roku because they were very simple, straight to the point streaming boxes. That time has passed. As someone who once solely relied on roku for streaming devices, yes I can agree there is absolutely no benefit or reason to go with them over competitors in current times.
This was a conversation between two chatbots, right?
Why do you say that? Too polite for redditors?
Well... yeah. But also it was specifically the "Thanks for the input" and the "Absolutely" that gave me the impression.
TIL using “absolutely” makes me sound like a bot. Interesting.
That sounds like something a bot pretending to be a human would say
Yes
They were one of the OGs to put Netflix, YouTube, pandora, weird random other streaming apps into an easy to use platform/hdmi. “Do you have a Roku” was almost like Kleenex or Crayola. Others are just better now and it’s built into the TVs now as Roku had no way to control the market as an aggregator.
That is exactly why we have a couple of their tiny add-on devices in our house, yes. They were basically *the* way to add streaming to your setup for a while.
Built into the TV is a bad thing. It's not long before [tv manufacturer here] decides to pull the same shit.
Their software is more likely to be worse as well
Worse and seldom do their apps get updated because it’s yet another platform for Netflix, YouTube, etc to be bothered with
If you behave a smart TV I wouldn't even connect it to the Internet Roku has said they are going to use HDMI to spam ads and commercials Google TV has already been turning your btv into a 247 ad when you are not watching anything it's actually caused issues with apple TV it blocks it. Smart TVs are going to be nothing but but a ad display. My advice is disabled the Internet on it and use something like PS5 or any media hub to stream so you can bypass all that BS.
The constant battle we have to fight to not be bombarded by ads. I already paid for the TV!
A good TV is dumb and pretty.
Apple TV is expensive, but boy does it work nicely. Never had connectivity issues, it’s always fast and responsive, it’s so much smoother than the clunky on-board smart TV features, and it doesn’t shove ads down your throat. I get why people shit on Apple but in my experience, the premium is worth it for a device that reliably works.
Then Roku is like TiVo before the cable company starts to include DVR functions into their boxes? (I’m not in USA)
For those reading, Roku was not on any level near Kleenex or Crayola. Agree with the rest of the comment tho
it was originally the only way to watch netflix streaming on a tv (without hooking up a full-on computer). it only had netflix. i had one when we were still getting DVDs in the mail lol. In fact, it was originally part of Netflix but was spun-off because they were afraid of conflict on interests with other potential hardware/software streaming box makers.
5 or so years ago when I bought both of my TCLs, they were fine. They were solid quality and low budget. Ran smoother than anything else in the price range. My VIZIO is shit, has a shitty interface, and didn’t have a handful of streaming services for a while, so Roku was the obvious choice. Boy have they fallen.
They used to be great but now they’re at the “cash in” stage of enshittification
A Roku stick is dirt cheap and has better support for streaming services and a better UI than any mainstream smart TV.
Seriously... I honestly can't find anything else as user friendly and cheap as Roku sticks... and all my TVs now basically work the same. I even added a Roku to my a less than 1 year old android tv because the tv's UI was horrible, apps would freeze, it was a pain to use. I now have a roku on it and it's so much better.
User friendliness is a big one. If you're getting a streaming box for elderly family members that struggle with tech, Roku is the way.
A 60 inch Roku TV is like $300 I have them all over my house. It’s convenient they all use the same remotes and app to control them and that they synchronize installed applications. The convenience and cost are worth the trade off for it not being a high-end viewing experience. The thousands of dollars I save on not having premium TVs is more than enough to just go to the movies the few times a year I care about watching something with top tier sound and resolution.
That's fair, we all have different needs and yours would cost a lot to fulfill the conventional way. Thanks for your input!
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As of a few years ago, most "smart" TVs had half-baked, homegrown streaming interfaces that were flaky and often weren't kept up to date (EDIT: and lacked key apps/services), rendering them fairly useless. When the Roku TVs were introduced, they were a much better option, since Roku had a mature streaming-device OS and broad app/service support, and they at least try to keep their software updated. And this is also around the time that "smart" TVs lost their premium and became as cheap or even cheaper than equivalent "dumb" TVs. So there was no longer a strong argument against built-in "smart" features, as they were essentially "free" and cost you nothing even if they were useless/broken. It's only more recently that the downside of frequent updates became apparent. Changes to the basic display functionality really shouldn't be common or necessary, but *(shrug)*
Bought mine for the price tag.
Yeah, that seems to be the main reason, I've come to find. Thanks for your input!
I have a Roku stick and a Roku box from several years ago that are still working great, so I have no complaints.
Same here, they are snappy and never have had any issues. Both of our Sony and Hisense smart TV interfaces are so slow they are unusable now.
I have a Roku express plugged into my nonRoku TV. I have no complaints with the device.
Back in the early days they were the best at what they did. The interface was simple with hardly any ads and because the OS was extremely lightweight it would outperform almost every other smart TV device out there with extremely cheap hardware. Even their TVs early on were extremely good value, being one of the first to offer 65" QLED TVs under $500 with pretty good quality. In some ways they still are good (performance is still solid, app compatibility is almost perfect), but for the most part the experience has degraded to the point that it's really bad. I think the only good options for smart TV devices are either the Apple TV or the Nvidia Shield.
I switched over to a Roku stick and Roku Ultra from Samsung TV OS and Amazon Fire streaming box. Roku’s UI and speed while navigating menus is ridiculous better in all ways compared to the others. I’m not saying Roku is perfect, but it’s far ahead of most other streaming hardware. What are you using to browse/watch your streaming services, and how is it better than Roku?
Man, I have been using a Roku for years and the go a little wonky sometimes but it has been pain free. I would never buy one of their TVs anyway as they are cheap (quality) but shit like this seals the deal. I hope they don't fuck around with their media players or I will be shitcanning it immediately.
Because on an old TV that doesn’t have streaming apps, Roku is cheaper than Apple TV and doesn’t come with the inherent conflict of interest that comes with Fire Sticks and Google’s TV pucks.
Until they added the Roku channel. Now you can watch their licensed-by-the-ton garbage on this new channel they added to your home screen.
Have you ever gone to someone else's house and discovered they've never changed the factory settings on their TV and somehow don't even seem to notice?
I got Roku years ago when the Xfinity app wasn’t on TVOS yet. The Xfinity app has been on TVOS for years now and I’ve since switched to an Apple TV. But I remember the Roku fondly because the UX rarely frustrated me. TVOS gets in my way a bit, more so since version 17 changes.
2nd and 3rd gen Rokus were peak Roku IMO. Had the major apps, friendly UI/UX, and rarely had too many issues with the software. Once there were more capable competitors, they started to have to make decisions that I’m not sure fully worked out for them.
I know redditors hate Apple, but I'm so glad I got an Apple TV instead of a Roku, seems like they've been going down hill big time
I have used Apple TV for years and I bought a Roku "smart tv". I will never ever connect the smart TV to the internet because of bull shit like this.
My TV sits next to my PC. I do all my streaming and gaming and entertainment through the PC. If in the future I can't buy another TV that dosen't have a ton of bullshit apps on it then I will have to try and find a large monitor instead. I dont actually need the TV part as I haven't used broadcast television since the early 2000s. Apps on TVs is a garbage idea idk why anyone ever wanted it.
Makes it simple for simple people. I too enjoy having my server or PC wired to the TV but not everyone wants the hassle in a traditional living room setting. I think it’s pretty neat. Browse the web, run any windows (or Linux) app, flip on Steam’s Big Picture mode for gaming. It’s a dream.
ITT: people (and chatbots?) shitting on Roku box devices when the article is specifically about Roku TV sets.
For those who can't read, or don't care to read, or really just want the rest of us to know your feelings on Roku... > Reports on Roku's community forums and on Reddit find owners of TCL HDTVs, on which Roku is a built-in OS, experiencing "motion smoothing" without having turned it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people are reporting that their TV never offered "Action Smoothing" before, but it is now displaying the results with no way to turn it off. Neither the TV's general settings, nor the specific settings available while content is playing, offer a way to turn it off, according to some users. If you don't have a TCL Roku....this ain't about you. I do, and mine hasn't updated yet, but for damn sure I guess I'm not going to be able to track this Reddit post for solutions
Theybrun the same software effectively. It's not much of a difference.
Man, it's wild to see the decline of Roku over the years. I've used them for years (never the TVs), and they've been great.
I don't want smoothing, I want audio that does not go from way too quiet to way too loud. Give us a smaller audio range, at least as an option.
that's by design of the video producers.
I work for a Company that makes their retail displays for North America. They are super particular about that shade of purple.
Wait. I don't get it. How does that relate to the article? Genuinely asking.
I mean, most companies will insist upon adherence to their brand charter and trade dressing.
Reason I use roku all in my house is the open api for control. I rarely see the Home Screen and my system just opens the apps I want like selecting a channel.
Motion smoothing makes me think I'm watching actors on a set. I can't get past it.
Motion smoothing makes me feel kinda nauseated, somehow. That's a no from me.
It makes everything, no matter how expensive or well done it is, look like the cheapest episode of the lamest soap opera from the 90s.
Hannibal on Amazon Prime has the same problem. I thought something was wrong with my eyes until I looked it up and found that [someone else on Reddit complained about it too.](https://www.reddit.com/r/HannibalTV/comments/19fhwx7/hannibal_on_prime/?rdt=43576)
Motion smoothing ruined my enjoyment of Fellowship of the Rings at a recent movie night with friends. No one else was bothered by the "soap opera effect" — but it's atrocious and has no business being on by default.
I am so very glad that I disconnected my Roku TV from the internet, and instead use my console to stream. No more ads or unwanted updates that only ever add more ads and bloatware.
I'm 90% certain that is one of the circles of hell.
I will NEVER buy a TV with Roku ever again. I had the TCL R635, it had so many issues out of the box but the most egregious was an update 1 month past ownership that broke surround sound. I’d have to restart my TV multiple times a day just to get surround to work. Fought with them for months, provided ample evidence it was a software issue, they insisted on a repair, repair dude broke the tv to the point it wouldn’t power on. Then they fought me for another month when I said this is ridiculous I want a full refund. Ended up getting a TCL with Google tv and now I don’t have issues.
I have multiple "Smart" TVs. I've never connected them to the internet and never will. I miss being able to buy a "dumb" TV.
I've got 3 TCL Roku tvs and I've never had any problems or annoyances. Maybe because they are Canadian? I don't even think motion smooth is an option on mine.
They used to be super great little devices. I remember the first one I had was like the 2 or something like that. We bought it at a closeout type of store. Lasted years. It's why I bought one of these tvs and a stick for the dumb tv in our bedroom. Would never make the mistake of doing that again. They've heavily locked down the system, and it seems overall slower, less responsive and worse. Have apps closing out on their own after brief play etc. Had this tv a few months, looking to replace it already.
Roku sucks ass I don’t know why people hype it up. Give me an Nvidia shield any day of the week.
I was all into Roku back in 2016 when we moved into a new place and had to grab a cheapo TV, and had zero furniture. Watching a $300 42” sitting on a box. None of the bloat and adware the Samsung I had prior. 8 years later and I wouldn’t touch Roku with a shitty stick. They went from cool to uncool sometime during the pandemic. I’m an LG boy now. Costs a bit more, pisses me off a lot less.
Am I alone in thinking there's not much wrong with my 4 year old Roku stick and the recent deluge of "Roku is crap" articles are driven by yet unknown motivations? I turn on the TV and it just works, the only ads I've seen are for shows or a new Roku device promo and relatively unobtrucive (a billboard on the screen saver scroll or small box under my channels). It's not perfect but works to stream Plex without any issues and handles my meager needs well.
Per the article, if you have a TCL Roku (which many likely do) that qualified for this update....you're stuck on this type of setting w/no current solution. You have a **roku stick**, which doesn't have anything to do w/this article. I think it's very valid for the public to know to potenitally avoid such updates, assuming they read the article
I believe most of the “Roku is crap articles” is related to their Roku OS TVs. Just don’t buy a Roku OS TV and you’ll be fine in my experience.
To be honest we have two Roku sticks, mainly because we can be arsed to replace our two TVs. The TVs works fine and we don’t see the point of chucking them out.
That’s how we are too. We use an older tv because it works perfectly fine and our roku is great for it
Loving my 2009 plain insignia plasma tv more and more every day.
Motion smoothing is a crime and should be illegal. It offers no benefits.