Best roku streaming media player7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Roku even fails to recognize some some seemingly basic requests, such as “Show me new releases.” Jared Newman You can’t launch a video directly by voice or filter results with follow-up commands. ![]() (One example: Roku heard multiple requests for “comedies on The Roku Channel” as an attempt to launch a channel called Comedy Dynamics.) Filtering by streaming platform also didn’t work with some services, including Netflix and Amazon Video.īeyond just technical issues, Roku doesn’t support the kinds of sophisticated queries that Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV do. The microphone has trouble hearing things unless it’s an inch or two from your face even then, Roku can misinterpret the results. That’s a broader selection than other platforms, and Roku even offers handy a 4K Spotlight app for finding UltraHD content across different apps.įor one thing, Roku’s voice recognition just doesn’t work that well. Roku supports 4K video from all those sources and a couple dozen more, including Netflix, YouTube, Smithsonian Earth, CuriosityStream, and Toon Goggles. Although Roku hasn’t made any splashy 4K content moves, akin to Apple’s price parity with HD for iTunes movies, third-party stores like Amazon Video, Vudu, and FandangoNow have started matching some prices on their own. The main difference between Roku’s two new Streaming Sticks is video quality, with the pricier Stick+ delivering 4K and 4K HDR. (Neither device picked up the 5GHz band in this location.) Only in the furthest corner of my house did the Stick+ show an improvement over its cheaper sibling, with a signal strength of “Fair” instead of “Poor” over the 2.4GHz band. The Roku Streaming Stick+ goes a step further, moving its wireless receiver out of the stick itself and into the power cord, though in my testing this didn’t make much difference. Apps generally take a few seconds to load across the board, and while frame rates do tend to drop below a smooth 60 frames per second in some apps, it’s rare to run into any outright freezing or other navigational hang-ups.īoth of the new sticks also use dual-band 802.11ac, rather than the 802.11n standard of the previous model, allowing for longer range and faster speeds over the 5GHz frequency band with a compatible router (they’ll support 802.11n if that’s all your router is capable of). But in practice, there isn’t a world of difference between any of these devices. Roku says the new Streaming Sticks are 50 percent more powerful than last year’s model, and that the Steaming Stick+ has more RAM. ![]()
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