My Letter to Roku

[shannon_a]

For the crappy companies file:

Dear Roku,

I am writing this letter to express my extreme dissatisfaction with the Roku player that I bought several months ago.

The main purpose of the Roku was to stream Pandora and Netflix to a TV. To be honest, it's never worked well. From the start, it'd usually lose its connection to Pandora after several songs, halting play. The Netflix experience was a little better, as it only lost its connection to Netflix every 10 times or so we watched a TV show. We very nearly returned our Roku within our 30 day trial, but the annoyance of doing so combined with the fact that it worked at a barely acceptable level for Netflix led us to keep it. (We did, however, stop using it for Pandora due to the frustration level there.)

Unfortunately, in the last month the Roku's performance has degraded immensely. Lately, we've found that it *never* connects to Netflix first time when we sit down to use it. Even having it retry the connection tends to fail. Instead, we have to reboot the Roku. Sometimes we have to reboot it twice. Sometimes it still doesn't work. Last night, after we rebooted the Roku twice to get it working, it then lost its net connection about 10 minutes into the show. We rebooted it again and there was still no luck.

I'm not looking for technical support. This is not a problem with our setup, with worked mostly adequately for a few months. This is not a problem with our wifi setup, as the Roku is 10-12 feet from our hub and everything else in the house works fine. This is not a problem with our internet connection, as nothing else has problems connecting to the internet. This is not a problem with Netflix, as I sat down with an iPad last night while our Roku was refusing to connect, and it popped the exact same show up fine.

This is a problem with the Roku, which was quite frankly our worst purchase of 2011 and probably our worst technology purchase *ever*. If you think that somehow we're experiencing an aberration and you'd like to make it right, we'd be willing to let you try. As is, we're ready to retire our Roku, which if you'll excuse my French, has proven itself to be a worthless piece of crap. We've also already begun to tell our friends and families about our experiences with the Roku.

Shannon A.

Comments

[webmacher.livejournal.com]

You know, my in-laws were having problems with theirs too... wonder if they have the same model?

It's a shame it's been so crappy. We have the first-generation Roku and it's worked great. I was thinking we should upgrade (more memory) but your experience is making me want to hold off! I hope you get a response.