Roku Express 4K +:Should the power light always be on?

JCorbin and ubaggins 

The Power button, as well as the volume and mute buttions, are TV controls.  These have no effect on the Roku device itself.  Only powers on and off the TV, not the Roku.

When you are finished streaming, you need to press the Home button on the Roku remote.  This will return you to the Home Screen (and stops all streaming and data usage).  The device will then enter a sleep mode after some time of inactivity and the light should go off.

The Roku device never really powers off, it just enters a low power/sleep mode.

Then when you go to watch the Roku again, you press the Power Button to turn on the TV, and you press the Home button to "wake up" the Roku.

----

Unless you have Auto-Power Savings enabled (Settings/System/Power/Auto Power Savings/20-min [On] ) or Bandwidth Saver enabled (Settings/Network/Bandwidth Saver [On] ) the device will continue to stream and use data if you just use the Power button to turn off the TV.  There is a possibility the screensaver may kick in after some period of inactivity, but no guarantees, as this is channel/app dependent.

Best practice is to remember to press the Home button on the remote when you are finished streaming.

jrossitr, the first Roku devices never turned the light off. Then, after a user suggestion, it was made to go off whenever the screensaver activated. Roku devices never really turn off, so the light isn't all that meaningful for anything. Recently, some models got a new "power saving" feature (that saves very little power and is more trouble than it's worth) and the light will (should) also go off when it goes into power saving mode. The most recent update (11.5) just totally messed up everything and people are finding that their Roku comes out of power saving on its own, the light comes back on, and sometimes even the TV turns on. If the light really bothers you (I honestly have never taken notice of any light on any of my multitude of Roku devices) try disabling "power saving" if your model has that feature under Settings->System->Power (or put a piece of black tape over it 🙂 ).