A smart improvement implemented in a dumb way. If you're Roku, you look around the landscape and note that most implementations of Live TV channels do not use channel numbers whether it's Pluto, Plex, or Peacock. They all have grids that are organized by genre and users navigate by going up and down in a genre along with setting favorites which minimizes having to go up and down in a genre. Plex actually has a different UI for its genres by using a horizontal genre bar above its grid rather than the left side vertical listing of the others. I really like the Plex implementation.
In any event, Roku sees this and concludes two things: (1) They can get rid of channel numbers because the others don't and therefore its users aren't getting a unique non-channel number experience with Roku, and, more important to Roku, (2) They can save money because the same simple remotes for their external devices can be used for their Smart TVs and their development and maintenance costs go down because maintaining channel numbers costs time and money.
For us, the Roku users, number (2) is especially bad because Roku, like too many companies today, goes the cheapest route for development and maintenance which also includes going the cheapest route for testing and acceptance. The result is Roku removed the channel numbers, but did not modify their related elements like the channel grid which was constructed and organized around the channel numbers. The other services either did that when they removed their channel numbers or weren't organized around channel numbers in the first place.
Roku's channel numbers kept order. You could go from channel 115 which was ABC News to somewhere in the 4000s which were the local news broadcasts with sports in the 200s, kids in the 400s, and music in the 1100s along the way. Pretty simple, if rather long to traverse from beginning to end, but you had an orderly way of doing it. However, when they took away the channel numbers, the organization essentially collapsed and you can no longer go from one end to the other. The best you can do is go through the individual genres on the left side of the Live TV channels grid, but maddeningly, how they're organized there is not how they're organized when you're watching a particular channel. This is where Roku really differs from the others and it causes all manner of confusion, frustration, and anger for users.
When I locate a channel in Game Shows such as Buzzr, I notice the channels before and after it and reasonably assume that when I'm watching Buzzr, I can reach those other channels by simply going up or down from Buzzr. This is how it worked with channel numbers and this is how it works with the others. It is not how it works with Roku. Apparently, Roku has channels organized by genre when you look at a genre, but when you look at the grid, you see a particular channel in essentially its place in the master list of channels which reflects the order in which a channel was added to Roku without any logical organization. I don't know this to be completely true, but that grid is random without channel numbers and that's as good an explanation as any. Some people say it's adaptive to how you've been viewing the channels. Great, but when I look at All Channels, I should see, wait for it, all the channels not all the channels I've been watching. That's what Recents is for.
This goes back to what I said in the beginning that it was a smart improvement implemented in a dumb way. They could have thought it through a lot better. They could have tested it a lot better. Programmed it a lot better. A whole host of lot betters. They chose instead the cheap and dumb route, and here we are.
The best advice I can give is to make full use of favorites because it's really the only way to deal with these non-channel number grids whether well or poorly done. No matter how much I like Plex's horizontal genre tab, I still don't want to scroll my thumb off getting to Classic Dr. Who when I can just scroll a little bit through my favorites. My thumb thanks me for that and yours will as well.
