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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Roughly 10 years ago, someone told me that Roku was making “cheap hardware to sell to Walmart customers in flyover states.” The remark was meant to be an insult, belittling a company that seemed to care more about hardware profit margins than design and innovation.
Still, I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the years. And as Roku became a major force in streaming hardware, surpassing 100 million households last month, I’ve come to the conclusion that Roku’s secret superpower may just be that it embraced not being cool.
Case in point: the new homescreen the company began rolling out this week. It’s a refresh that had been overdue for some time, and, in many ways, it’s the bare minimum the company could have done — which means it’s likely going to be a huge success.
Content-forward, but not overbearing
Companies that make streaming dongles and smart TVs have long pushed the idea of content-forward user interfaces. The gist of it: People don’t want to launch an app, browse through row after row of thumbnails, and then do the same thing all over again in the next app if they can’t find something they want to watch right away.
Content-forward interfaces instead serve up personalized recommendations for individual movies and shows directly on the homescreen. Add some tiles to quickly access the next episodes of your current favorites, and you’ve got an interface that makes it much easier to actually watch TV without wasting time on discovery.
Amazon was first to embrace a content-forward interface with its Fire TV devices more than a decade ago. Google followed suit with Android TV, and then doubled down on the idea when it relaunched its living room platform as Google TV. Today, virtually every smart TV platform has some kind of content-forward interface.
The sole exception, up until now: Roku. The company added some dedicated content categories to its sidebar over the years, but largely kept the homescreen a bare list of app icons.
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