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Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

I hate to break it to you, but you are only a tiny fraction of the users of something like Roku. The software isn't developed for individual users, it's developed according to a product roadmap, which is itself driven by the behavior of the largest and most profitable cohort of users.

If you don't fall into that category, you don't have a choice. Things that may be irritating or upsetting to you, if they make money or drive some number that helps a manager get a promotion internally, you're simply out of luck when it comes to software.

Products aren't built for individual users, they are built for massive collections of users that generate revenue.

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This presumes that a very large fraction of Roku users asked for motion smoothing/soap opera effect. I would be surprised. (1) Most people I've pointed it out to say "I can't tell the difference". (2) None of those people had ever known that this method even existed--even a lot of people on this thread didn't know about it before today. (3) As for profitability, is there a single person in the world who would buy a Roku because it had motion smoothing?

A ton of people ask me for TV recommendations. Rokus were my goto, but not anymore. I won’t buy one.

Their response so far suggests this isn’t on accident (it’s a feature!) and they won’t change it back. I’ll probably have to not hook up the internet on my next TV. Use a steaming box instead.

I have a TCL Roku TV. It is not, has never been, and will never be connected to the Internet. I have to restart it periodically because there’s a strange sound system bug that makes the audio insanely quiet, but it sure was cheap.

It gets its video from a TiVO or an AppleTV box. I’m not using the internal software for anything - I don’t trust it at all. You might think the same of Apple, and that’s fine, but I’m posting this from my iPad, I have an iPhone and an Apple Watch and a Mac; they could screw me any time they wanted to, but other than pushing out strange UI they haven’t.

Agree on Apple, they could screw up over but they really do look at users as the customers because we give them most of their revenues.

Consumers are at best the #3 most important customer, after advertisers and TV manufacturers, for Roku. They have incentive to not care about consumers.

That's a solid point! Much as I gripe about my iPad Pro not doing things I wish it did, Apple still sells a gazillion of them to people who think their vision is better than mine. They're a $3T company by knowing what their customers want.

I'd be tempted to give Roku the same benefit of the doubt except that the person here on HN who says they like motion smoothing is literally the only person I've ever heard of who did. My in-laws are far, far from tech-savvy videophiles. Last time we visited them I had to set their TV to the right aspect ratio. They'd been watching it that way for ages. And when a software update turned on motion smoothing, they called to ask me how to turn it off because they absolutely hated it. These are regular, non-techie people who just want to watch TV and have zero interest in tweaking or tuning a thing. They are not nit-picky. If it bothered them so much that they had me fix it, I've gotta think there are a lot of people who dislike it.

And because of all that, I think this decision is bonkers. It's a hugely polarizing setting. People who like it like it. People who don't tend to absolutely detest it. I can't imagine what advice Roku got that made it seem like a good idea.

I agree with you and this is why I choose android or android-based streaming devices, in my case Fire TV. There’s enough hackability built into android that you can use e.g. tasker or other dedicated macro apps to do just enough customization that it ends up working the way you want. I know I’m the minority and most people don’t care or take it for granted how the thing works, but I don’t.

In my case I basically would love if Fire TV never did another update, stayed on old Android 9, and just let me use the three or four streaming apps with my custom launcher – I don’t want anything else, thanks

As a related aside, I have a Fire Cube device on one of my TVs along with Jellyfin. I've been ripping all of my Blurays and DVDs to a local NAS with the objective of having my content available even if my internet connection is down. I discovered, the hard way, that the Fire TV won't function AT ALL without an active internet connection. It just says it cannot load the home page with no option to open any installed applications. Other STBs in my home worked just fine during the outage. If I can't find a way to make it run Jellyfin during an outage, it's going in the bin.

Hey I hope you see this: you can use your fire cube offline, the thing that doesn’t work is the home screen. But if you hold down the home button, you can get to the app quick launcher (first or second selection, depending if you use profiles) and launch the app directly

I get around this with my custom setup but the hold down home / quick launch is available on all fire tv devices since the beginning.

That does work as stated. Thanks!

Thanks! I'll try that this weekend.

We tech people throw a tantrum whenever something isn't perfect, while most people don't give a fuck - if it works it works.

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