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Fox to buy Roku

wsj.com

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Re: Fox to buy Roku

#4

Post by andrewla »

As a long-time[1] customer of Roku I am tentatively extremely pessimistic.

I have always been unhappy with Roku's decision to get involved in streaming content at all, because it could potentially cut into their service-agnostic architecture. Bad enough in my mind that they had in-platform ads instead of just charging for hardware, but way worse when they are actively competing with streaming services.

And now it looks like it has happened -- a large content provider wants to buy the company, and while I hope that they can at least notionally continue to be service-agnostic, the temptation to cheat to favor your own services will always be there an when cost cutting and belt tightening is on the table, that is surely what will happen.

[1] My order for the "Netflix Player by Roku": "CustomerID# 1162 Thank you very much for your Roku order. Your order number is 2472, placed 5/20/2008 at 10:01AM."

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#7

Post by pickleglitch »

So now the same corporation that owns Fox News is going to own Roku? No thanks. Guess it's finally time to switch to a custom Android TV box or Apple TV. Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#10

Post by IshKebab »

pickleglitch wrote: post #7

So now the same corporation that owns Fox News is going to own Roku? No thanks. Guess it's finally time to switch to a custom Android TV box or Apple TV. Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.

> Or roll my own, but I've tried that and found it pretty difficult.

I agree, there seem to be no good options for this. You can use Kodi or whatever, but I want something that supports playing my ... totally legally acquired content... and Netflix/Disney/iPlayer/etc. In a package that's silent and low power.

Doesn't seem to exist unfortunately. I guess the closest is Nvidia Shield. You can apparently still sideload APKs onto that... for now. I'll buy one when they release an update. I'm patient!

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