At some point when the hardware fails, I will not automatically be getting a ROKU. I will look at the best hardware at the time in terms of price/performance. We went with the ROKU because of its neutrality (almost went with the NVIDIA SHIELD TV).
I am not quite sure I get the ROKU investment thesis either, but haven’t looked into it that much.
in the future, I expect most of our viewing devices (TVs, desktop displays) may be able to just download ROKU software and use it as a general purpose streaming manager.
Android TV does this today, and I am not sure why you couldn’t just have Android tv instead of ROKU in that scenario. ROKU would be content-neutral and, in theory, not be biased towards Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or Google Play/YouTube TV.
By the way, I just attempted my first real cord-cutting and it was an abysmal failure.
I was researching YouTube TV, and it looked pretty good, and had most of channels my family would want to keep access to if we removed cable service. I was looking at leveraging Hulu for a couple other channels that YouTube TV didn’t have, but there was definitely overlap.
My 6-month old stud 4k UHD Sony Android TV did not have the YouTube TV app…just regular ol’ YouTube. Huh. Same thing with my fancy schmancy Sony 4K BluRay streaming player. Huh.
Ok - so I go buy NVIDIA Shield, which I always secretly wanted a good excuse to do. It was a cool little gadget. However, YouTube TV maxes at about 720p.
WTF?
What is the point of having a 4K streaming player and/or 4k UHD tv, when your “cable replacement” can’t even do basic HD-quality streaming? So I returned the Shield, wiped away my tears, and decided to just beef up my internet speed and commit to at least one more year with my cable provider. Will check back in a year and see if they streaming folks have gotten their game together yet.
Netflix and Amazon Prime both do deliver many high-quality HD shows. But that is not the same as replacing my AMC, FX, TOON, SCI, SYFY, HIST, HDTV, and other beloved cable channels.
This circles back to Roku, because on TV’s that Roku comes prebuilt, they would only have to update the software, and so as YouTube TV and others improve their offerings, your ROKU-powered streaming TV would be able to take advantage. Same with Android TV being preloaded, provided that those TVs do indeed get software updates. I give ROKU an edge here because since this is all they do, I imagine software updates will be more common, whereas Google could just decide to go another direction. I have older Sony Android TV devices that are basically bricks now…never updated to handle the current versions of Amazon, etc…
This was a bit of a ramble, but I do think there is a future for ROKU, but not sure how it translates to stock/revenues right now.
Dreamer