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Television

Is Roku Driving the Final Nail in the Coffin of Traditional TV? (nerds.xyz) 51

Posted by EditorDavid from the islands-in-the-streaming dept.
"Roku is celebrating a milestone that says a lot about where entertainment is heading," notes a new article at NERDS.xyz.

"For the third month in a row, people in the United States spent more time streaming on Roku-powered devices than they did watching traditional broadcast television." Nielsen's latest data shows Roku-powered devices accounted for 21.4 percent of all TV viewing in July. Broadcast came in at 18.4 percent. That gap may not seem huge, but it marks a steady trend from May and June where streaming also came out ahead. Roku says its share of TV viewing is up 14 percent year-over-year, which suggests people are not just trying streaming, they're sticking with it...

Roku powers streaming on smart TVs and devices in over half of internet-enabled U.S. households. By its own numbers, it sells more TV units than the next two operating systems combined. It's a reminder that Roku has positioned itself as more than just a box or an app. It clearly wants to be the place where television happens.
Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.
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Is Roku Driving the Final Nail in the Coffin of Traditional TV? More

Is Roku Driving the Final Nail in the Coffin of Traditional TV?

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  • No Roku here!

    My (new) TV is Google TV powered.

    My streaming box is an AppleTV.

    I do have a OTA antenna that I just got, and I'm amazed at how many channels it pulls in! A lot more than the cheap flat hang on the wall style that I had before.

    As for traditional tv...I don't think Roku or anyone else killed it. I think it committed suicide by refusing to get with the times and by insisting on doing business the way it always did.

    People want to watch when they want to watch, and they don't want to watch all those

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xeoron ( 639412 )
      Both are Linux devices and it is the year of the Linux Powered TV Desktop

      • Personally, I could not care less what OS my assorted various devices run on. I have to think that the overwhelming majority of people don't either.

        What they care about is price and features....actual features, not stuff like OS.

        • Personally, I could not care less what OS my assorted various devices run on. I have to think that the overwhelming majority of people don't either.

          What they care about is price and features....actual features, not stuff like OS.

          No doubt. I've been quite happy with my Roku stick for years and it's not because of the kernel. It's the tiny form factor and the great usability. It's much better than other streaming clients I've tried.

          It's not perfect by a long shot, just much better than the alternatives. When it craps out, I'm willing to buy whatever is best at the time. I'm not married to Roku in particular.

    • What kind of antenna did you get?
      I need a better one .

  • Easier to get a good signal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday September 06, 2025 @04:04PM (#65643686) Homepage

    Even though I live in suburban Houston, where there are hundreds of OTA channels available, there are often issues with broadcast quality. Some of the antenna farms are 50 miles away. With streaming (Roku or otherwise) it's possible to get good signal quality almost all of the time.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "I want to tell you 'bout Texas radio and the big beat
      Comes out of the Virginia swamps
      Cool and slow with plenty of precision
      With a back beat narrow and hard to master"

      Once upon a time, Cajun and Holy Roller low power radio stations made for interesting nighttime listening in Houston.

    • Even though I live in suburban Houston, where there are hundreds of OTA channels available, there are often issues with broadcast quality. Some of the antenna farms are 50 miles away. With streaming (Roku or otherwise) it's possible to get good signal quality almost all of the time.

      Thats a lot of words to say people are far too damn lazy to plug in and tune an OTA antenna.

      Lets not bullshit ourselves. The antenna farm could be in the backyard and it wouldn’t matter.

      • Got an OTA antenna. Clearly you're making stuff up.

      • Thats a lot of words to say people are far too damn lazy to plug in and tune an OTA antenna.

        Lets not bullshit ourselves. The antenna farm could be in the backyard and it wouldn’t matter.

        It doesn't because that's not the point. OTA requires watching things on the broadcaster's schedule. Streaming lets me watch on my schedule. That's the qualitative difference. You could give me the best OTA signal in the world and I wouldn't use it without a DVR.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      >Some of the antenna farms are 50 miles away.

      you don't need that kind of distance go have a problem.

      most of the transmitters in town are something like 5-7 miles from me. I can clearly see them with my naked eye from about half my front porch (a two story pool building across the street blocks the line form about half).

      But they seem to have crammed two many sub-channels into too little bandwidth. Some days my wife's favorite western channel comes in perfectly clearly, but mild weather variation can cau

  • I just wish that the streaming services did better at making good Roku apps for their services.

    They often seem clumsy or buggy, as if the Roku version is an afterthought.

  • Unskippable ads with make in unwatchable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hwstar ( 35834 ) on Saturday September 06, 2025 @04:08PM (#65643692)

    21.5% of users using a Roku is going to be a big issue if you want to watch ad-free content. Advertisers will be trying their damnedest to make sure the ads they buy on the Roku platform are unskippable.

    I watch on Youtube. There will probably come a day where you have to log in and use some proprietary browser extention which does not allow you to skip ads.

    The enshitification will continue until people have had enough. It's hard to predict when this will happen, but given things get more enshittified every day, the breaking point will eventually come. It will have a lot of hysteresis. There will be demand destruction.

    Maybe after it all comes crashing down, maybe reading something will become popular again as a means of entertainment.

     

  • First and foremost, the article leaves out the other 60% of the market? Who owns how much of that?

    Roku is puny with just slightly more than broadcast TV. Who the fuck watches broadcast TV in 2025? Apparently barely fewer than those that watch Roku.

    Roku pulled a very smart move by striking a deal with HiSense and others to embed Roku in their cheap smart TVs. This means that Roku player has an outsized installed base. Their viewership is expected to be high. It should be significantly higher than it is. Some

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by registrations_suck ( 1075251 )

      I watch broadcast tv. Why not?

      I turn on my tv. There it is. No cost. No complications. No internet required.

      I bought a TV in May. It has AppleTV built in. No idea if it has Roku built in, but there isn't a button for it on the remote like there is for AppleTV.

      • No surveillance. Giant benefit. Uncompressed signals used to be the norm for OTA. Another big benefit. Not sure if that is still true. Still free.

        Sooo... tell me about this new antennnnaaaa...please

        • Surveillance? I would happily publish a lot of everything I watch, in exchange for $10/hr for my time and a free blowjob on Sundays.

          As for the antenna, I got it at Best Buy:

          https://www.bestbuy.com/produc... [bestbuy.com]

          It pulled in about 100 channels. After I deleted the shopping, Spanish and GodTV channels, and the channels with marginal quality, I still must have 75-80 channels or so.

  • Traditional TV programming became unwatchable with 15+ minutes of max volume ads per hour of programming. People started leaving that shitshow even before real alternative materialized. Roku is following that trajectory.

    • It's closer to 18 minutes.

      If you download torrents of 1hr shows, they're usually about 42mins long.

      Scary to think of how much of my time could have been consumed by that over the last few decades.

    • Traditional TV programming became unwatchable with 15+ minutes of max volume ads per hour of programming. People started leaving that shitshow even before real alternative materialized. Roku is following that trajectory.

      So is Amazon, YouTube, and maybe some Netflix offerings. Ad revenue is too lucrative to ignore and advertisers are too interested in showing ads to just give up.

      But while that's why I was a DVR early adopter, that's not the killer feature. I can hit the mute button if need be. The real win is schedule freedom. Every time I turn on live TV and realize I came in half-way through the show, it's a rude shock.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        >I can hit the mute button if need be.

        the mute button was the most important technological advance in the second half of the twentieth century, even ahead of recording and fast forward.

        It does, though, mean missing all those opportunities to by precious metals for a third their value, guaranteed acceptance insurance with a benefit of three months or so of premiums, and so forth. Oh, and all those products worth about the shipping cost, but with the opportunity to pay a few tines that plus shipping.

  • Skimpy (Score:3)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday September 06, 2025 @04:50PM (#65643730)

    This article doesn't have any links, so...

    1) There is no definition of "broadcast TV".
    2) Do they include cable TV as "broadcast"?
    3) And what portion of that is DVR?
    4) And what is the other 39.8%?

    I do have a Roku, but rarely use it. I refuse to watch anything with commercials, and only occasionally subscribe to some higher-level streaming. Prime Video is now riddled with commercials unless you pay even more, so that is out. I mostly just use it to stream local stuff.

    Most of my TV watching is TiVo + CableTV (and yes, the pricing of cable TV is ridiculous). It knows what I like and fills itself with thousands of shows, series, etc. The main problem is over the last several years, the quality and quantity of what is available has been getting lower and lower. To the point there are only a few channels left with any meaningful-to-me content, like the History Channel, NatGeo, and a few others. For me, the writing is definitely "on the wall."

    I actually find myself watching YouTube and Rumble (a distant second place) more and more on my computer. Far more time than I spend on my "TV" now.

    • >"I refuse to watch anything with commercials"

      Reply-to-self for clarification: I refuse to watch anything with commercials or other content (warnings, public service crap, intros, trailers, sponsor junk, etc) that I cannot block, skip, or fast-forward through.

    • This *advert* is not a scientific paper up for peer review.

  • OTA broadcasts quit in 2004 here. The broadcast stations never made good on their promise of remodeling the translator network. I can't really blame them, it costs money to run translator stations and they can make money by charging cable and satellite companies to carry their "valuable" programming.

    Except that the programming isn't valuable. If it's worth watching at all it's only worth it if it's free. I am not paying to watch commercials. Especially since the commercials are for Spokane businesses and th

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      I've occasionally wondered it the broadcast stations are slowly reducing power to save money and to shift people to cable/satellite so they can make more money there.

      Doubtful. First, cable companies are exempt from must carry rules for low power stations. And even if they "must carry", the market in which they must do so is restricted to the OTA coverage area. So if the signal doesn't make it to a local cable head end with a sufficient S/N ratio, they don't have to put it on the line. There are a number of low power "Jesus channels" which are listed on wider area OTA TV guide web pages. But they are not on cable.

      A 1 milliwatt signal with a directional antenna straight into a receiver dish to feed the cable network.

      The FCC (and must carry legislation) isn't going to fall

      • Big broadcast networks donâ(TM)t use the must carry rule because if they did they wouldnâ(TM)t be able to charge carriage fees. Only religious channels and home shopping networks who would have to pay the cable companies to carry them try to use that rule.
  • All these cheap streamers are lagging for the amount of memory used and ads they are trying to serve. You add a closed Roku OS to that mix and it is all down hill from day one.

  • We've got a Roku in our spare room, but nowadays it mainly gets used to access our Jellyfin server or as an AirPlay client - both of which it does reasonably well. But the Roku experience itself seems to be going downhill.

    In any case, Roku didn't start this trend; as with many many other services, it's simply taking advantage of it.

  • I have an ancient Roku 2 and I use it very occasionally to watch YouTube. I don't subscribe to any streaming services, so it's no use for that. And some services (such as Amazon Prime) are no longer even compatible with the Roku 2.

    Honestly, I probably watch my TV for less than an hour a week. Most of my video consumption is on my computer, where I can block ads. And I'll never upgrade my Roku because I don't want ads (Roku 2 is too old to have ads, thankfully!)

  • Nope! (Score:3)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Saturday September 06, 2025 @05:23PM (#65643798)

    Cable TV will survive until the boomers and Gen X die off. I don't know anyone under 50 with a cable subscription anymore but I have family friends over 50 and most do have cable or satellite but not much streaming. It's definitely a generational thing.

    • On the other hand, I don't know anyone over 50 with a cable subscription anymore... oh wait, I think the landlord does. Contrariwise, my neighbor (30?) does have cable TV.

    • Cable TV will survive until the boomers and Gen X die off. I don't know anyone under 50 with a cable subscription anymore but I have family friends over 50 and most do have cable or satellite but not much streaming. It's definitely a generational thing.

      I wonder how many of those “old-fashioned” Boomers have a TV subscription that costs half as much as what the New Kids on the Cable Block are paying, fractured across half a dozen providers?

      Perhaps cable will die off when being ripped off becomes fully en vogue.

      • What do you mean? We have more choice now. You may not appreciate the fragmentation and I can definitely sympathize with that feeling but now you don't have to pay for discovery or hbo or cbs unless you sign up to do so. Cable, it's everything your tier offers. Doesn't matter if you watch one or two channels or all of them, you are paying for the package.

        Depending on the time of year, I don't have any subs active at all. NFL season rolled back around and I paid $79.99 for a year for all games live on my pho

  • If lack of gamepad / voice control didn't beat it to that. A Google TV box beats Roku IMHO.

  • Shouldn't all broadcast TV just be provided by satellite constellation by now?

  • Roku is NOTHING like it used to be 15 years ago with all kinda FREE content channels ! Plus you could side load other content then they took that away ! That WAS its biggest draw for people ! Last time I tried Roku 2 years ago, it was almost completely pay for channels. I can stream for free from different internet sites. Would never buy a Roku TV either.

  • Cutting cable and OTA is not "Roku". This reads like an ad trying to redefine "streaming" as their product name.

    How many slashdot folks use Roku vs :
    Amazon Fire
    Google TV/Chromecast
    Apple TV
    Nvidia Shield
    Tivo
    Google TV 4k Pro

    And those are just similar products and ignores smart TVs like Samsung, LG, Sony, as well as other streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, Paramount, Apple, Amazon, YoutubeTV, etc.

    I personally have 2 Nividia shields, 2 Chromecast, as well as two Apple TV boxes.

  • To watch our Tablo dvr which has recorded broadcast channels.

  • It would help if digital over the air TV could pick up reception. In NYC the turn over from Analog signal to digital destroyed rabbit ears...

  • No (Score:1)

    by kc-guy ( 1108521 )
    Like most headlines that pose a question, the answer is no. But the planned digital television broadcasting migration from ATSC 1 to v 3.0 might be what kills OTA TV, as it's not backwards compatible, and the media lobbyists that run the standards group is pushing to require "security certificates" that increase operational costs for stations, and facilitate censorship and DRM in OTA broadcasts.

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