@Harvini wrote: whether this is due to a failure by ROKU to pay its bills or maintain a proper contract to provide this service, or, whether it is part of an intentional program to reduce/eliminate OTA service within ROKU powered sets.
Those are both valid concerns. It's been clear since I came to this forum that:
1. Roku puts the customer last. Roku won't even argue that point.
2. Roku enters into licensing agreements with tv makers which seem to be severely under-thought. I.e., "glib" in Roku's estimation that everything will be ok.
The way Roku constantly infers that all the problems are the tv makers' fault (or, especially TCL) but won't explain exactly how the tv makers are causing Roku's software updates to be buggy (to such an extent they appear to be untested) you have to wonder if the guide service was subscribed to with similar carelessness and lack of professional due dilgence. ("We'll just do this, and everything will work fine. Ice cream for everyone!").
3. I have definitely gotten the impression Roku is deliberately making antenna tv less useable because, in Roku-speak, we're just "fleas." We don't generate carriage and ad-sharing revenue.
The way to "fix" that problem (since we're not customers, but merchandise for Roku to sell to content providers) appears to be to make antenna tv unplesant. A huge number of customers have asked for numeric remotes for YEARS. Roku acts like we don't exist. Now 1000 channels were added to antenna tv. Favorites were removed (which would have been a reasonable way to limit what you have to navigate through). And, continuous channel changing was disabled (one button press for each of the 1000 channels).
Nobody would think that's reasonable. The people at Roku aren't dull (I don't believe). I think we have to ascribe a motive which doesn't involve lack of intelligence, or innocent mistake. I think they want us to travel through 1000 channels which will put carriage and ad-share revenue in Roku's pocket. (Maybe a penny pre momentary landing on one?). It doesn't matter what the customer thinks. We aren't customers. We're *the product* being sold.
On a side note: I've remarked before about how Roku leadership and investors are preening themselves over stock price, and how the apocalyptic pandemic drove so many new subscribers to Roku. They're moist about how such a windfall dropped into their lap.
I've been saying: "be careful what you wish for." What essentially happened was future customers rolled forward into the current fiscal year. That may look good if that's all Roku's leadership wants to look at. It could also look bad. Very BAD if it's 10x more people getting experience with Roku as we know it. The company that doesn't care about customers, doesn't test updates, doesn't have clear, productive partnerships with TV makers (and perhaps doesn't have any service-level agreement with the "guide" us all to). There could be 10x more negative word of mouth being cultivated.
Be that as it may: FTC complaints would be the best course of action. State AG offices also involve themselves in this type of matter (or, some states have dedicated consumer-protect offices which the AG's office will know about). I'm positive that's how the class-action types learn of "opportunities." I don't like those folks much. They're the only ones who win. But, Roku's clearly not listening to customers. Maybe that would get their attention.
"People are often amazed at how much we’ve done with the number of engineers we’ve got." (Roku CEO Anthony Wood, Austin Statesman, Oct 4, 2019). "Amazed" is one way of putting it.
