Roku setup

[Angry-Customer]

When I purchased this Roku Premier, the sales guy said that no online account was needed, which was important to me because I don't want the hassle of dealing with another.  He said that I could simply plug it in and use it.

When I got home, I found that I had to have an online account to activate it and worse yet, I had to enter my credit card information for this.  These kinds of requirements should be clearly posted on the outside of the box.  It's about an hour's drive to MicroCenter, but I'll drive back tomorrow to return this thing.

Very disappointing.

[makaiguy · Accepted solution]

Your salesman didn't know what he was talking about.  A Roku account is required as that's what your channel selections are linked to.  This enables multiple Rokus on a single account to all share the same channels with one common installation for each.

You can create a Roku account without registering a credit card via https://my.roku.com/signup/nocc.

[Strega]

Sales people rarely know anything.  If they're good, they can predict the answer you want to hear and give it to you.  I had one sales person tell me that you could get premium channels for free if you bought a TV with enough ohms! (And several other whoppers!)  That said, access to your roku account can be so infrequent that the sales person could have easily forgotten. 

For what it's worth, you can learn a lot about a product you are considering by spending a little time on their forums and reading reviews.  I've been on product forums where someone has posted: "Is this all this thing does?  Because the salesman made it sound like it was going to change my life!"  🙂

[zoku]

SOLVED: October 2022

This solution didn't work for me, but I did succeed.

I followed the normal activation method until they asked for my payment method.

Now I wasted a lot of time trying to set up a fake paypal account but they wouldn't let me confirm that method on the Roku account.

I don''t think I needed to do this, what I found when I followed the link was that I was already logged in.

However I needed another activation link to complete the activation.

I ended up restarting the device (don't know if this was necessary or not).

I actually input my roku email address incorrectly as it happened and when I corrected that I got another activation link.

Following the second link, I found that the payment method was bypassed and I was able to add some free channels and just follow the process to it's natural conclusion.

[bobson]

Zoku your resolution helped me immensely. I was so angry that they were demanding my credit card. What a horrible implementation! Cheers