Learned more about the Roku

[dreamshark]

So I looked up some tips online and figured out what the all-important asterisk-key is for, and I'm liking this thing even better. Here's some tips that weren't at all obvious at first, might be useful to other Roku owners.

• You can edit the home screen!  Hide the channels you will never use, move your favorites to the top. Go to home screen, select (but do not open) a channel, push the * on the remote. Navigate the menu to "Remove Channel" or "Move channel" and do the obvious. Moving the icons around is like a tedious sliding block puzzle, but at least you can do it.
• There are more free channels, but you have to look for them. They're in the Channel Store. Poke around and you'll find it. Some good ones that I found: Plex (more miscellaneous free stuff), lots of free news channels, and The Lego Channel (!)
• Just because a channel appears in the home screen doesn't mean it is set up and ready to go. Obviously you need to sign in to paid accounts like Netflix and link them to the Roku device. But a surprising number of free channels also require logging in and entering device codes. It can take a while. Have your smartphone or laptop handy when you start setting up channels. 
• USE THE VOICE COMMAND FEATURE! You can search for any movie or show and Roku will find it on every channel where it is available. So you don't have to know which service a movie is on in order to search for it! You can also search by actor and to some extent by genre, and who knows what else. There seems to be a lot of other stuff you can do with the voice commands, but figuring out what all is available is a little bit like playing the old text-based adventure games. If I can use it to turn closed captioning on and off I will be a happy woman. 

Channels that look pretty useless:

• Apple TV. If you don't have an Apple TV device, I can't imagine what you would need this for. And if you have an Apple TV box, why did you buy a Roku?
• Peacock. This is some ungainly NBC product that appears to be competing with Hulu for the ad-supported TV business. There's a lot of random content at the free level, but nothing like what Hulu offers. Mostly the free service appears to be a first step to trying to sell you premium services. 
• HBO. This is a hot mess right now. HBO is in the midst of trying to migrate all of its confusing HBO services to the new HBO Max, but they haven't negotiated the final contract with Roku yet. So if you buy HBO through Roku, Lord only knows what you will get. I am interested in at least a couple of months of HBO so I can watch Season 3 of Westworld, but I'm going to wait until this settles down. 

Comments

[spiderplanet]

We have done HBO through Roku, but it's been a while. Thanks for the heads up to wait until the dust settles on that nonsense.

[carbonel]

The term "AppleTV" is very confusing, because it's both a channel and a device. You don't need an AppleTV device to watch AppleTV shows, but you do need to pay for it. It's about $5/month, I think.

I've been watching For All Mankind (AU in which the USSR got to the moon first) occasionally because I got a free year's worth when I bought my recent iPhone.

[dreamshark]

Yeah, I figured that out. However, it doesn't look like the Apple channel has anything on it worth paying $5/month for. But if it's free, why not?

Apple TV is easy to understand compared to YouTube or HBO.

[carbonel]

Oh, and I found some stuff on the Tubi channel that I liked, including an Australian crime show called City Homicide. Content there is free, with the occasional ad to pay for it, not too annoying.