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Fox to buy Roku

wsj.com

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Re: Fox to buy Roku

#331

Post by al_borland »

hbn wrote: post #285
freeAgent wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Of course, Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs chock full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.

The only issue with Apple TV is they still can't figure out a good remote. I feel like I need to hold my breath and be very intentional with my swipes so when I'm e.g. swiping up/down to get to a menu where I can turn on subtitles I don't accidentally swipe left or right, sending me scrubbing 17 minutes forward. Either touch is a bad input mechanism for controlling your TV, or Apple hasn't figured it out.

You could try the Salt remote. From what I remember they got permission from Apple and it’s officially supported.

https://www.salt.ch/en/internet-tv/equipment/remote-control

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#332

Post by tredre3 »

Fnoord wrote: post #222

A company with the business practices of Fox News I will not buy services or products from. Same with regards to Oracle. I actually regret buying a Nvidia Shield TV. Yes, software support might be there. But what isn't there is the interface (without advertising, the cancer of the world) it came with. Thanks to Google. Thanks to Google, my children are now forced to see inappropriate advertising when the TV gets powe…

I don't know why you blame Google, as if Nvidia wasn't the one who made the device, chose the software, and sold it to you.

Were they held at gun point by Google? Is there a contractual obligation to not ship their own ads-free launcher instead of randomly switching back to Google's? Are they not the one packaging and distributing the software?

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#333

Post by Grombobulous »

andrewla wrote: post #4

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 loo…

My other concern is the highly partisan nature of the Fox company.

This isn’t a content company that caters to viewers across the political spectrum or purely focuses on entertainment first, this is a company that almost exclusively runs right-leaning political media outlets.

Your Roku already has advertisements and other content nudges on the Home Screen, and now those are going to be very one-sided and potentially politically motivated.

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#334

Post by al_borland »

literatepeople wrote: post #149
thayne wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any alternatives that are independent of streaming services?

Not really. Apple TV seems to be the closest ive found to not being riddled with ads though. the home screen doesn't have ads at all, the closest which exists is the "top shelf" feature when you hover over the Apple TV app, and that can be turned off in settings. But it has some other issues

My one gripe is that I sometimes get notifications on my AppleTV that there is an offer for 3 months free of Apple’s streaming service. I didn’t even know the AppleTV had notifications before this. I hope insidious tactics like that end when Tim Cook steps down. While it’s better than full-on ads, like most others have, it still makes the experience feel cheap (in a bad way).

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#335

Post by calmworm »

freeAgent wrote: post #186
andrewla wrote: post #4

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 loo…

Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Of course, Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs chock full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.

Ironic how?

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#336

Post by wwweston »

starik36 wrote: post #297
mike_bob wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biden passed some of the toughest anti-trust laws in the past 20 years, but Trump repealed them quite literally in the first month he returned to office, calling anti-trust legislation as "bad for business".

The only entity that "passes" laws in this country is Congress. You mean via executive order? That's not exactly passing a law.

Your language more accurately reflects how the US government is supposed to operate, and that's important, we'd all be better off if people remembered that the government has a number of branches with different responsibilities, actually kept track of who controls each, and otherwise understood the system.

It's also more or less true that the Biden administration took more responsibility and initiative in antitrust enforcement:

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/10/02/biden-ftc-antitrust-...

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/the-biden-administration...

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#337

Post by reaperducer »

pseudosavant wrote: post #208
rhubarbtree wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm Apple is best but Roku is amazingly good number 2. In some ways its UX beats Apple.

Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in. I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.

Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.

I believe there are TVs that come with AppleTV built-in. I'm not in the market, so I haven't looked, but I suspect they're not the bargain basement Wal-Mart sets.

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#338

Post by reaperducer »

hbn wrote: post #285
freeAgent wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Of course, Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs chock full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.

The only issue with Apple TV is they still can't figure out a good remote. I feel like I need to hold my breath and be very intentional with my swipes so when I'm e.g. swiping up/down to get to a menu where I can turn on subtitles I don't accidentally swipe left or right, sending me scrubbing 17 minutes forward. Either touch is a bad input mechanism for controlling your TV, or Apple hasn't figured it out.

The only issue with Apple TV is they still can't figure out a good remote. I feel like I need to hold my breath and be very intentional with my swipes so when I'm e.g. swiping up/down to get to a menu where I can turn on subtitles I don't accidentally swipe left or right, sending me scrubbing 17 minutes forward.

Didn't Apple replace that remote with a proper clicky remote like five years ago?

Re: Fox to buy Roku

#340

Post by al_borland »

prepend wrote: post #200
socalgal2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty happy with AppleTV except for the walled garden. I want to run Kodi. I do run it via XCode and a dev account but because of the app restrictions it's a 2nd class experience. Looked for alternatives like Jellyfin but the only ones on the app store all appear to spy on what you view.

I run Plex and am pretty happy. Will likely eventually switch to Jellyfin as Plex is getting lamer and lamer.

I’ve been a Plex user since the early days. I currently run it on a Synology NAS in a container, using the Plex app on the AppleTV as my primary client device. I tried setting up a Jellyfin container a few months ago as I’ve been concerned about the direction of Plex. It went poorly.

I have a fairly large library, which Plex never seemed to care about. Jellyfin choked. It took forever to go through it all, and I seem to remember questioning of it was working; it wasn’t clear. Plex on the other hand makes it pretty entertaining to watch covers flip over as the metadata is loaded in to see the progress. Then every app I tried on the AppleTV also seemed to have trouble. The one that worked best had to create its own local cache of everything, which required I spend hours browsing to every screen and waiting before it became reasonably smooth. After that, the layout was still pretty strange. I think it would have worked just as well to point it at a file share. Actually playing videos was hit and miss in every app I tried.

I’m still using Plex. If I need to move to Jellyfin at some point, I feel like I’ll need to build a server with a lot more power than Plex requires. Of course that’s just a theory… a theory that will be expensive to test.

For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.

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