Roku Mulls Building Its Own Smart TVs (nexttv.com) 34
Roku, the leading supplier of smart TV OS in North America, is looking at possibly building its own TV sets. Nexttv reports: According to Business Insider, Roku convened a focus group earlier this month in which participants were shown "different models, feature sets and names, sizes, price points," of smart TVs, according to an individual "familiar" with the event. This unnamed person told the news site that the moderator made it clear that Roku is exploring the possibility of "going it alone" with its own "manufacturing operation," and not merely attaching its brand to an existing smart TV manufacturer's product line.
Vertical players in a horizontal market (Score:4, Interesting)
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Randomly punching people on city streets for the lulz is a leftist technique, so troll exposed.
Re: Vertical players in a horizontal market (Score:1)
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No thanks (Score:2)
Why donâ(TM)t they first make their existing devices better (for starters by increasing app load times by putting a faster CPU and more RAM.)
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
In 3-5 years, Roku will sell itself due to newcomers "revolutionizing" the space -- which will have simply been greater strides in hardware investment powering newer UX. Of course, Roku knows this, so they're looking into the hardware direction themselves -- but additional form factors would justify the quantity demands for CPU/RAM procurements.
PS: I hope I'm wrong and Roku successfully expands their hardware portfolio and investments, in addition to their expanded media library... but, at the moment, I don't see them seeing the end of the decade as its own business entity.
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Exactly. I'd rather have a dumb/simple, high-quality display, with a long shelf-life, and use dongles and/or external boxes (with wired NICs available) for the intelligence as the latter are easier and cheaper to replace when it get EOL or I want to switch to using something else to get content.
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The problem (well, a problem) is that those dumb displays are pretty expensive. I looked for one the last time I replaced my TV and ended up just getting a regular one and ignoring its software in favor of plugging in a Roku and an Apple TV.
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Works too, of course. My main point is that I'd rather not have a TV that get obsoleted just because Roku (or whoever) stops supporting something. I have a Sony Blu-ray player that use to have Amazon and Netfilx access (etc), but doesn't now 'cause Sony stopped supporting the device -- still works fine for discs though. Fortunately, I can use my TiVo for Amazon Prime now...
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I do the same thing. The biggest problem for me is that when the smart stuff on the TV dies, you can't even switch inputs.
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Agreed - but the economics don't stack up. If the TV vendor doesn't slap advertising all over the experience, then they can't get their prices low enough to sell TVs in the first place. I have no idea what the prices differences would be, but I'd imagine you'd end up spending 25% more (at least) to get a "dumb" TV (if someone actually made such a thing). At that price, they're literally selling to hundreds of people instead of millions.
It turns out consumers are very price-sensitive with TVs - that's lead t
Step up in quality? (Score:2)
Hopefully they want to do this to get away from the problems with what everyone calls their âoeRoku TVsâ that seem to be forever broken. There is at least a new complaint per day of sets with bad panels on Reddit. Make Roku TVs with good hardware and made it a premium option instead of the $200-$300 ones out there now that seem to last maybe a year.
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Probably won't help. AFAIK, the most common cause of LCD TV/monitor failures is the T-Con board. T-Con boards tend to be universal across a wide range of panels of a given size by a given panel manufacturer. So unless Roku starts building their own *panels*, they're likely to have similar levels of failure as everybody else.
The only failures that are likely to be fixed by building the entire TV themselves are bad capacitors (which show up after a decade, typically) and broken plastic parts (which usuall
advertising (Score:3)
Anything to control the advertising you see. This is just a ploy to push their own ads.
Where's the sustainable competitive advantage? (Score:5, Insightful)
"We've never made TVs before, but let's start making TVs!"
So which market are you going after? The bargain end like HiSense where large TVs are already branded as "Roku TVs"? Does Roku really think they can quickly mass-produce their own Roku TVs more profitably than an established company? How many years can they sustain losses while they do their own R&D and acquire production capability? Do they think they can sell an actual "Roku TV" for less than a cheap HiSense TV that licensed their tech? The margins at this end of the market are tiny and they'll have to sell a lot of them to cover their overhead along with having a low defect rate to even be profitable.
So how about the premium end? I'm not even sure where they think they could establish themselves as a premium brand of TV where at those price points, people could get a well-known brand like Samsung or LG. And while the margins are higher, the risk are much higher that a few public defects will kill the brand.
What do they do that distinguishes them? They get every streaming service on their device. Add the ability for me to easily search for a movie, say, "High Road to China" and then connect me directly to that movie on one of the services I'm already subscribed to.
Also their relatively cheap devices are the way people can keep using their older expensive TVs. When my Samsung has disabled Netflix, Youtube, etc., the $30 Roku lets me keep using that TV.
That, and if they could make their devices play subtitles on the content I've ripped from my own DVDs that would be great!
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They won't actually make them they will just be rebadged models, just like the 100 or so TV's already available in just the US, but that goes back to your point ... the market is flooded with cheap rebadged TV's so what's the advantage?
The electronics express down the road already sells a 50 inch no name 4k Smart TV for 200 bucks, and heck I bought a 50 inch TCL 1080p screen 10 years ago for about the same and it still works fine (with a firestick plugged into the side)
So what are they going to do, enter
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You could take a hopeful (or naive...) perspective and say that Roku is looking to curate their brand a tad and use better rebadged TV hardware. Maybe in combination with dropping Roku branding/software options on the lowest end hardware.
I figure they have to be slightly aware of the problem with "Roku TV" being tied to the lowest end brands and hardware. It was worth it to get more market exposure, built ties into the TV business and some of them benefitted from not having to go with worse software for
Re:Where's the sustainable competitive advantage? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is because Roku merged with an advertising company. Roku is no longer about selling hardware, hardware is just a means to track you and serve ads to you.
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There's a Plex app for Roku so you can access your own rips if you run your own Plex server.
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Thanks! I can access my content because I've set up a Mini-DLNA server. But for some reason, most DVDs use image-based subtitles (VOBSUB) rather than text, and Roku players can't play them.
At my home I just use an old Chromebox (CN60) running Linux & Kodi, and it plays them just fine.
I've heard Plex can do some kind of process so that the subtitles are burned into the video that's sent to the Roku.
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Plex on Roku suffers from a lot of the limitations place on it by the Roku platform. If you are going to use Plex spend the extra money and get a Nvidia Pro Shield. Trust me on this, you won't regret it if you like Plex.
Coffee flavored coffee, beer flavored beer.. (Score:3)
Another "Smart" TV (Score:2)
Roku's Basilisk (Score:2)
Although the current generation of smart TVs have been built by TV manufacturers like Samsung, they have already been criticized for vendor lock-in. A smart TV branded by a streaming box manufacturer kicks that to a new level: it would now become possible for such a device to lock out any attempt to connect a competing streaming box externally, by monitoring its HDMI inputs for content from sources other than Roku.