Roku Is Now Making Its Own TVs (cnet.com) 40
Roku is stepping up from streaming sticks and audio bars to making its own TVs. At CES 2023 the streaming device manufacturer introduced two new lines: the Roku Select and Roku Plus. From a report: The new lines will consist of 11 models in total, ranging in size from 24 to 75 inches, and will include up to 4K resolutions. The HD-based Roku Select series will come equipped with Roku Voice Remotes, while the step-up Roku Plus units will ship with the $30 Voice Remote Pro. Roku's first foray into TV manufacturing comes on the heels of successful partnerships with more established TV suppliers such as TCL, Hisense and Sharp. "These Roku-branded TVs will not only complement the current lineup of partner-branded Roku TV models, but also allow us to enable future smart TV innovations," Mustafa Ozgen, the president of Devices at Roku, said in a press release.
Although it's talking about the future, there's no indication that Roku is looking to push the technological envelope with its own TVs just yet. The company will initially be competing with its own partners, in fact, for a segment of the budget market. Roku has released only limited information so little is known about the differences between Roku-made TVs and Roku-branded ones. Roku has so far relied on partners to innovate in terms of picture quality. The TCL 6-Series Roku TV, for example, uses the latest in mini-LED technology and comes with full-array local dimming and a reasonable price. But the company also announced a reference design for a Roku OLED TV in the hopes that one of its manufacturing partners will take up the task. The Roku TV lineup will range between $119 and $999.
Although it's talking about the future, there's no indication that Roku is looking to push the technological envelope with its own TVs just yet. The company will initially be competing with its own partners, in fact, for a segment of the budget market. Roku has released only limited information so little is known about the differences between Roku-made TVs and Roku-branded ones. Roku has so far relied on partners to innovate in terms of picture quality. The TCL 6-Series Roku TV, for example, uses the latest in mini-LED technology and comes with full-array local dimming and a reasonable price. But the company also announced a reference design for a Roku OLED TV in the hopes that one of its manufacturing partners will take up the task. The Roku TV lineup will range between $119 and $999.
Will they still be trash? (Score:2)
Any TV that I've ever owned/used that had Roku integrated in it has been absolute laggy garbage. Want to change a channel, wait a moment. Go back "home" and select Amazon Prime Video instead of Netflix? It'll take a dozen button presses with a ton of lag between each one.
Hopefully this means that
A) They'll be able to deliver better quality
2) Other TVs will stop using them and maybe get a better OS ( although I'd be happier with a simple dumb screen )
...and yes, I did that on purpose.
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Licensing software is a high-margin business.
Building hardware is a low-margin business.
It is unlikely Roku can be in both businesses since their current licensees aren't going to buy from a competitor.
Apple makes money on hardware because they have a premium brand. Roku is not a premium brand.
This might not be a smart move. But it could be a good case study for future MBA students.
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Roku is selling ad space and user data on their platform. They also now charge money to allow the big players in their app store at all, but in exchange those apps get a cut of the user data. I don't love their business model, but their platform is probably the least adversarial of the major vendors - you can get both Youtube and Prime Video. Amazon went years without Youtube, for example.
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My Hisense was like that and I was almost ready to return it but decided to allow it to update the firmware. Their ip stack was even buggy by requesting an address but not accepting one from my server. It picked the wrong subnet. Finally set a static lease and it updated and worked so much better. That said I essentially use it as a monitor for other devices and it will never have an internet connection. If you let newer models update they will hassle you to register and not leave the registration screen.
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The Roku OS is great. Just buy a standalone Roku with more horsepower like the Premiere. I'd rather buy a dumb TV too, but I settle for a smart TV where I never touch the smarts.
The same is true of the Fire sticks (and the Roku sticks) and some Fire TVs.
Google TV seems to only show up on more premium TVs, so I rarely see it performing as slow but I've seen a few of those. Google definitely doesn't make a really slow "stick" - the Chromecast with Google TV seems to be pretty quick.
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Google TV seems to only show up on more premium TVs, so I rarely see it performing as slow but I've seen a few of those.
We have a 55" HiSense that was about $350 with tax, so it's a cheap POS for sure, and it runs Google TV. I forget which CPU it has, but it has plenty of power... the GPU, on the other hand, is garbage. I run Kodi on it and some codecs aren't well supported, but I can play most of what I find. Lately I've been playing DVD rips anyway (full disc contents with menus and whatnot) and obviously that works great. So in my limited experience, a cheapass Google TV not only exists, but the performance is acceptable.
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Roku should just make it so their TVs have a naked Roku on a card you can replace/upgrade down the road if you want.
I really hoped TVs would have some type of standard slot for Roku, Apple, Google etc ... one might say that's what the "stick" devices are but those are the low end of the experience spectrum.
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The "slot" is HDMI. I'd love some standardized STB sizing that can either go on slide mounts on the back of the TV, racked in an AV rack, or something like that. But as much as I have having a dozen power bricks for my TV setup, I'm not ready to trust my TV to supply power for the devices.
Actually, USB type C would be slim and simple and properly handle voltages and wattages maybe reliably. Could even use alternate mode to act as an HDMI input. At the very least, I could have just one transformer with m
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I was pretty much resigned to doing that when I spent a couple of days leveling up my parents' tech. The ancient non-HD flat-CRT TV in their bedroom got replaced with a 40" Vizio (largest that would fit the cabinet). For what it's worth, the TV wouldn't even connect to their network (couldn't get a DHCP lease), so it's effectively a dumb TV. A Roku stick was also purchased with the TV; it had no trouble tethering o
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In my area it's AT&T and Spectrum. The customer service on both are absolute trash. Both will absolutely make you reboot your computer as a troubleshooting step when every single computer is offline and the modem is blinking about waiting for a signal.
Anyway, when AT&T fiber came through town, I switched in a heartbeat. OK, actually, I switched a year later. Because the people going door to door didn't even know what kind of equipment was being used and whether the fiber goes all the way into th
Re: Will they still be trash? (Score:3)
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Ultimately thats really a function of the SBC they dedicated to running the roku OS
And you can imagine how that chain of fail happens; TV mfg: "What is the absolute minimum cheapest conceivable POS SBC we can source that will just barely run your platform?" Roku: "Well... it works pretty good on XYZ." TV mfg: "Too much money. Got anything cheaper?" Roku: "..."
Perhaps Roku will do better with their own brand TV. Their higher end STBs perform well. Only problem I have is the audio quits working about once every two months and it has to be rebooted to clear the problem.
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The OS is Linux. That means the audio driver is some Linux kernel module. My suspicion is that the kernel and the module aren't 100% wrt sleep modes; cycle in and out of sleep enough times and the driver gets wonky.
They are not manufacturing TVs (Score:2)
They are simply putting their name on a TV made by some OEM for them, as progress from putting their IP into other brands' TVs.
That's not manufacturing.
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Of course they do. It's OEM rebranding. Roku was stating exactly that; the article wrongly raised the claim that Roku was "manufacturing".
Also, their RCs! (Score:2)
I hate the very few buttons with RCs. I want buttons with numbers to change channels with antenna, cable, etc.
With blackjack! And hookers! (Score:2)
(offer void in Louisiana)
Who buys this crap? (Score:2)
I buy a TV for a quality screen. I turn off as much of the extra poo as possible, make sure it's got current firmware, then disable the network. I do use stand-alone Roku boxes, but they are only used to do two things:
consume content from Amazon Prime
act as a front end to feed media from my own PLEX server to my home theater system
Everything else is dropped on the floor by my pihole appliance running on a raspberry pi.
I can see the Roku doesn't like this as it is by FAR the biggest offender for drops on t
Re: Who buys this crap? (Score:2)
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Who buys this? Who uses "smart" TV functionality?
The vast majority of people who are not you or me.
Made Under Contract By? (Score:3)
I simply don't believe that Roku is building a TV factory and producing their own hardware. I do believe they're contracting with a manufacturer to build them for them under their own name. So who is actually making these TVs?
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Probably Hisense. They make TVs for Sharp and Toshiba (as well as their own brand) and are already a Roku partner.
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Existing Roku TVs are made by TCL.
I only know this because I was shopping for shitty cheap 4k TVs and wound up buying a HiSense instead.
Roku's only competitive advantage was no ads on the home screen. If not for that, I would have bought one of their TVs. But since they now have homescreen ads and are inferior in every other way (except for artificially not being able to run the Roku app on Google TV, and since there's like two things I want to see on Roku, TPB is an acceptable solution for me) there is zer
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Existing Roku TVs are made by TCL.
The Hisense Roku TV showing the local news above my fireplace is most definitely NOT made by TCL.
Also, probably worth RTFA since it lists out makers/brands of Roku TV's -- their partners who may also become their competitors. The article also brings up how Amazon does this, also.
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Hmm, how old is your Roku TV? We got our shitty HiSense recently and they seemed to all be Google.
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Hisense has also offered Android TVs for a while, so I would imagine it's based on your retailer's supply chain. I had the options (across both TCL and Hisense models) when I chose this unit.
Android Smart OS has a lower license cost than Roku, so I'm sure most third-parties will reduce their Roku options... and that's possibly what's spurred Roku to jump int
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We don't get into semantics when we say Apple makes the iPhone. Or that Dell builds computers.
Re: Made Under Contract By? (Score:2)
Roku fan, but... (Score:2)
I'm a fan of Roku - I have two of them - they are vastly superior to the "smart tv" oses in my random TVs...
I find Roku to be far less "spammy" than Fire TV (tried out out - it felt like the entire OS was just constantly trying to sell me on stuf/ services I didn't have)
But I'm not so sure how I feel about them going into TV business - I like that I can keep my "smart streaming stuff" separate from the TV itself - using the TV as simple monitor is just way more comfortable for me.
Maybe I'm just not with the
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My main issue with Roku making integrated electronics is that I worry about a major change in streaming causing the host device to become obsolete before its time.
If you can use the TV without the Roku software, that's one thing. But if the Roku software is required to watch, say, HDMI or OTA input, then that's a big problem.
They made the only good Blue-ray player (Score:2)
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Agreed. Part of me died when I read they were getting out of the optical disc player business.
I loved my Oppo DVD player to death... the HD upscaling was second to none. I held off buying a BD player until I knew what Oppo was going to do (which took them a long while). I was part of the early-access testing group for their first BD player (the BDP-83) and had one of the first 50 released to the public, before general availability. Loved it to death and still do... it works great. Once I had the BD player I
Still won't do IPv6 (Score:2)
Maybe not a big deal for most but having IPv6 shows a commitment to the future.
Also streaming with CGNAT it would seem streaming with IPv6 would be more sensible.
Uh (Score:2)
Seems very risky --capex is high for TVs and profit margins are low. It can easily derail. Plus, they might alienate TV manufacturers whom they presumably want good relations with.
The names kind of suck (Score:2)
Being Roku means no Ethernet ports right? (Score:2)
The lack of Ethernet ports on most Roku shit puzzles and astounds me.
I drew a representation of 27 apartments in a 3 story x3 deep with another next door with a narrow walkway in the middle apartment complex and what it means to be the butthole in the middle where Roku is involved. All 27 apartments have identical setups, a cable jack under the TV, the cable modem/WiFi router combo plugged into that jack in the living room and a Roku 3 feet from it. Because Roku only has WiFi and they didn't bother to us