None of that stops me from recommending the Roku platform to streaming newcomers. Helping you find free stuff to watch is still one of Roku’s strengths. Besides, having to say “on Roku” at the end of every Google Assistant or Alexa command is a mouthful. I couldn’t successfully set up Alexa with the new Roku Ultra, and with Google Assistant, I couldn’t get direct playback to work. You can’t launch live TV channels by voice on Roku players either, and while Roku OS 9.2 adds support for playing local media files by voice in the Roku Media Player app, this only works with personal media files, not movies or shows that you’ve acquired through other sources, such as an over-the-air DVR.įor hands-free voice control, Roku does have the advantage of supporting both Alexa and Google Assistant speakers, but the implementation is cumbersome and limited. Netflix and Amazon Prime aren’t on that list, and I even had trouble getting some supported apps, such as Hulu, to work properly. While you can use the Ultra’s microphone button to search, launch apps, and control certain functions such as closed captioning, only a small number of apps support launching movies and shows directly by voice. Roku remains a laggard on voice control as well. Apple TV has also made big leaps in this area, with its TV app providing recommendations, news, live sports, and a watchlist that works across apps. The approach stands in increasingly sharp contrast with Amazon’s Fire TV devices, whose home screen provides quick access to recently-watched Amazon Prime videos, live TV channels from services like PlayStation Vue and Fire TV Recast, and recommendations from apps like Netflix and HBO Now. “Zones” are a new feature in Roku OS 9.2, showing up when you search for certain genres.įor the most part, though, you’ll watch things on the Roku Ultra by browsing through individual apps, arranged in a grid on the home screen. With OS 9.2, Roku has also started curating search results pages for certain genres, such as comedy and horror, with subsections for new releases, free content, 4K titles, cheap rentals, and more. ![]() There’s still a “Featured Free” section on the home screen that surfaces ad-supported movies and shows from across different apps, along with a “My Feed” section that tracks new episodes and price drops for TV shows, movies, actors, and directors. Roku does continue to dabble in content discovery. Jared Newman / IDGĪ big grid of apps is still the main way you’ll get navigate on the Roku Ultra. Conversely, if you appreciate Roku’s app-first approach to navigation, you can rest easy knowing little has changed. If you were hoping for Roku to make big changes on the software front this year, the Ultra’s new Roku OS 9.2 software will be a letdown. You can also use the Roku mobile app to listen through headphones with any modern Roku player. Keep in mind, however, that Amazon doesn’t completely shut down apps when you close them like Roku does, so it can jump back into recent apps much faster compared to the Roku Ultra.Īlso worth noting: While the Roku Ultra still has a headphone jack on its remote and a pair of JBL earbuds for private listening, Best Buy will soon sell a special version of the Roku Streaming Stick+ that also has a headphone jack (and non-JBL earbuds), and it costs the same $60 as the standard Streaming Stick+ available elsewhere. Testing the Roku Ultra against Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube, the results were a wash, with some apps loading faster on the former and others loading faster on the latter. I couldn’t discern any performance differences between the Ultra and Streaming Stick+ while using Hulu, Pluto TV, and Plex, and while Netflix launched about a second faster on the Ultra, navigation speed and content loading times were about the same. Still, the speed increases aren’t universal. ![]() Vue’s channel grid also loaded about a second sooner on the Ultra, and it was a split-second faster at refreshing program data when scrolling down the grid guide. PlayStation Vue, Sling TV, and Tubi TV all launched roughly a couple seconds faster on the Ultra than they did on a Roku Streaming Stick+. ![]() These claims held up in some of the apps I tested. With those hardware improvements and some software optimizations, the company claims that it’s seen an average 17 percent improvement in app launch times for the top 100 streaming apps, and a 33 percent improvement for live TV streaming apps in particular. While Roku doesn’t give out exact tech specs, new Ultra has more memory and a higher clock speed on its quad-core processor than previous models, all in service of loading apps faster. The Roku Ultra remains the only Roku player with all these ports, including USB, microSD, and ethernet.
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