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Roku has been building internet streaming media boxes longer than just about anyone; it released the original Roku DVP back in 2008. Roku now licenses its software to run directly on TVs, and sells multiple different hardware devices, from streaming boxes to svelte streaming sticks. Its flagship product we're taking a closer look at here is the Roku Ultra (See it on Amazon) / (See it on Amazon UK), a 4K HDR streaming box that offers a lot of functionality for a very reasonable price of just $99.
Inserting Roku functionality into other company's devices is more important for the company than ever, but it's still clear Roku puts a lot of care and attention into its own hardware. If you want to stream 4K HDR content, this is an affordable way to do it. But Roku has a lot of work to do if it wants to create a modern interface and feature set that meets the standards set by its best competitors.
label=Design%20and%20Features
The Roku Ultra is a flat, small box with rounded corners, completely unremarkable aside from the trademark purple Roku cloth tag. That’s fine, really. Unremarkable is generally what you want in a set-top box, as you don’t want it calling attention to itself when you’re trying to watch TV. Along the back you’ll find an Ethernet port (100Mbit, not Gigabit), an HDMI 2.0 port, a microSD card slot (to expand the internal memory for more channels), and the power port.
That power port is for an old-school barrel connector that goes to a pretty typical wall wart AC adapter. Along the side, you’ll find a USB port for local playback of video files, which the Roku handles pretty well. The built-in app for local file playback isn’t terribly attractive, but it does support a decent assortment of popular image, audio, and video file formats and codecs.
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One unique touch is the remote finder button on top of the box. Press it and your remote will emit a loud sound (you can pick from several sound options) to help you find it in the couch cushions. Speaking of the remote, it’s an interesting mixture of great and awful. It’s a good size, comfortable to hold, and easy to use without looking at it.
The latest version of the Roku Ultra comes with a tweaked remote that includes a power button that can power on your TV (and only your TV, not your receiver) and volume buttons to control TV volume or headphone volume (if you have headphones plugged in). There’s a voice input button, and A and B buttons for use with gaming. There are dedicated buttons to launch Netflix, Sling TV, Hulu, and HBO Now, which are fast and easy ways to get to those services.
But small annoyances abound everywhere. Those A and B gaming buttons are practically useless and just take up space, given how weak the selection of Roku games is. Those four dedicated service buttons? You can’t re-map any of them. I use PlayStation Vue rather than Sling, but I can’t re-map the Sling button. You can’t even change the A and B gaming buttons to launch apps if you don’t care about gaming. This is an example of how Roku's modern emphasis on platform revenue that hurts the consumer—companies pay to get those branded remote buttons, and they probably don’t want to let you change them.
The volume buttons are awkwardly placed on the side of the remote, and only control your TV volume. If you a have a receiver or sound bar, you’re out of luck (unless your TV will control it via CEC). There’s a headphone jack on the side of the remote so you can listen to TV without disturbing others, and the Roku Ultra even comes with a pair of earbuds, but using themwill devour the batteries.
The Roku Ultra supports HDR 10 and can pass Dolby Atmos along to compatible receivers, but doesn’t support other formats like DTS-HD Master Audio or DTS:X, and it doesn’t support Dolby Vision HDR.
label=Setup%20and%20Performance
Setting up a Roku is simple enough. You’ll have to jump onto your phone or computer to link the Roku to your account and set it up with a payment option in case you way to purchase content, and you’ll peck out your email and password with the remote for most apps. That’s par for the course, but Apple at least lets you use your voice to dictate those passwords. Otherwise, setup is quick and painless, and will auto-detect what video modes your TV is capable of.
That said, using the Roku Ultra after using the latest Apple TV or Android TV boxes is like going back in time. It’s very fast and responsive, but it’s just so basic. It’s a very dated interface. There’s a simple vertical menu list on the left, and a three-wide column of app icons in the middle (Roku calls them “channels” in an effort to be TV-like, but they’re just apps).
There’s no content-first strategy here at all. No list of suggestions based on what you’ve watched before, no “hey one of your favorite shows has a new episode available!” You can’t even arrange your apps into folders or groups, so if you have dozens of them, you just have to scroll through the list. You can, however, add a show, movie, or actor to your “Roku Feed” and dive into that to see new releases and price drops. It’s a handy feature, but it’s not at all proactive—it’s another thing to manage. It also doesn’t know anything about your viewing history, so when a 10-episode Netflix series drops all at once, and you watch the first three, your Roku Feed won’t provide a quick link to Episode 4. It’s also a second-tier menu item rather than a first-class citizen on the home screen. You need to scroll down to the feed and select it before you can see what’s new. Like so much of the interface, it feels several years out of date.
There’s no real multitasking, and no systemic use of overlays. When you search, you leave the app you’re using to look at search results, and have to re-launch it. It’s so backwards compared to modern interface conventions where search results pop up on top of what you’re doing, and where you can hop between apps much more quickly and easily. Everything on Roku is “go into an app, back out, go into another app, back out…” Some apps—including major apps!—are so bare-bones and half-baked that they look like they were made for the launch of the original Roku and never updated. PlayStation Vue is a grid of thumbnails. Spotify looks like a test script, just an ugly search function with no personalized content or playlists at all. It’s not like this everywhere. You have the modern Netflix and Hulu interfaces, for example. But I found it often enough in the apps I care about to grow aggravated by it.
Granted, ugly and outdated apps are not Roku’s fault. It’s up to the app developers to deliver a good experience. But clearly some major services are putting their best foot forward on Apple TV and Android TV, while Roku support is a left to languish.
The voice search feature on the remote works pretty well, though it does have a little trouble understanding less-common names. While it is fast, it is very basic compared to what you get on Apple TV or Android TV. You can search for the name of a movie or TV show, an actor or director, genres like “comedy,” or launch into apps with commands like “Launch Hulu.” Compound searches are totally hit-and-miss, though. “Movies starring Will Ferrell on Netflix” simply doesn’t work at all. “Movies starring Will Ferrell on Hulu” was accurately understood, but still returned a list of search results full of totally unrelated stuff (Star Trek?). And you can’t do follow-up searches: once you search for “comedies on Amazon” you can’t then further filter down the results by saying, “only from 2015,” for instance.
The strength of Roku’s search is that it works with lots of different services, and makes it easy to compare prices or let you know if a show or movie is included in a subscription. Roku doesn’t have its own content store, so it has no interest in pushing you to iTunes or Google Play or YouTube, and treats all sources equally. It just feels like searching the way we did in the ‘90s, with simple one or two variable commands totally devoid of context. And the voice commands are only for search, not device control. Commands like “volume up” or “back up one minute” will actually jump out of the content you’re watching to perform a search for those words!
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The Roku Ultra is a confusing set of contradictions. The interface is lightning fast and dead simple, but does not dynamically surface new content, and lacks the visual polish and appeal of its competitors. The remote is comfortable and well-laid-out, but inflexible, with buttons dedicated to individual services that cannot be reassigned and no support for receivers or sound bars. 4K HDR streaming works just fine and the box supports enough file formats to read most of your own content off a USB drive, but some apps are so ugly and out of date that they’re a pain to use.
This feels like the best streaming box of 2014. There’s nothing wrong with the hardware, but the software, for all its speed and simplicity, feels unsophisticated and silos content into apps instead of surfacing it to the main interface. The remote needs better volume buttons and should support receivers and sound bars, and you should be able to re-map those dedicated app buttons. I’m reminded of TiVo—by far the best product in its category many years ago, but so afraid to change that everyone else has passed it by.
label=Purchasing%20Guide
The Roku Ultra has an MSRP of $99.99 but is usually available at a modestly discounted price:
