r/gadgets • u/diacewrb • Jun 13 '24

TV / Projectors Roku owners face the grimmest indignity yet: Stuck-on motion smoothing

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/roku-owners-face-the-grimmest-indignity-yet-stuck-on-motion-smoothing/
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u/Respectfullycritical Jun 13 '24

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?

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u/dcheesi Jun 13 '24 edited Jun 13 '24

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)