Yeah, I understand that the power button is a TV control and has to be programmed for a particular TV. I guess I was assuming that when you press the power button it would also be propagated to the Roku device itself (via a different method than IR) and it would be aware that the button was pressed. After all, why not send this information to the Roku, just like when any other button on the remote is pressed (even though this button also sends IR control to the TV). But if this is not the case, the Roku device would be completely unaware that the power button was pressed, and so it could not know to go to the home screen. In that case my suggestion would not be possible.
Pressing Home before powering down the TV is easy for me to remember. But not so easy for my kids or wife to remember. They (particularly my wife) are already confused by the plethora of options and having to click into an app just to watch TV channels (on YouTube TV for the local channels). It would be nice to have the ability to create shortcut buttons at the top of the home screen for, say "open YouTube TV app and go to live channel guide" or such. But that's probably not easy and would require some collaboration between Roku and the various app providers.
I find the whole thing quite cumbersome when you just want to do a certain thing and not go gallivanting through a bunch of other stuff to get there. Even once in YouTube TV (which I chose because it has certain channels that my wife needs) it is cluttered and confusing, with all kinds of suggestions for **bleep** to watch, that you have to wade through just to see what's on TV or find a certain channel. It's like its designed by 20-year-olds for only other 20-year-olds to use.
I remember the problems my elderly mother had with her TV stuff. No streaming, just cable TV. But it was so easy to press the wrong button and end up in lala land. I gave her a simplified remote control that basically just had volume and channel buttons, but occasionally she would scroll onto some channel that wasn't active and required some special button to be pressed that was only on the original cable TV remote with its like 100 buttons. Which meant a trip over to her house so I could get out the cable remote and press that button. A "cut the cable" setup like mine is now would be completely unusable for her.
It seems like there would be a market opportunity here for someone to create a system that is easy to use, or could be configured to be so, even for utterly non-tech-savvy people.
