jmtd → log → Review: Roku Express

I don't generally write consumer reviews, here or elsewhere; but I have been so impressed by this one I wanted to mention it.

For Holly's birthday this year, taking place under Lockdown, we decided to buy a year's subscription to "Disney+". Our current TV receiver (A Humax Freesat box) doesn't support it so I needed to find some other way to get it onto the TV.

After a short bit of research, I bought the "Roku Express" streaming media player. This is the most basic streamer that Roku make, bottom of their range. For a little bit more money you can get a model which supports 4K (although my TV obviously doesn't: it, and the basic Roku, top out at 1080p) and a bit more gets you a "stick" form-factor and a Bluetooth remote (rather than line-of-sight IR).

I paid £20 for the most basic model and it Just Works. The receiver is very small but sits comfortably next to my satellite receiver-box. I don't have any issues with line-of-sight for the IR remote (and I rely on a regular IR remote for the TV itself of course). It supports Disney+, but also all the other big name services, some of which we already use (Netflix, YouTube BBC iPlayer) and some of which we didn't, since it was too awkward to access them (Google Play, Amazon Prime Video). It has now largely displaced the FreeSat box for accessing streaming content because it works so well and everything is in one place.

There's a phone App that remote-controls the box and works even better than the physical remote: it can offer a full phone-keyboard at times when you need to input text, and can mute the TV audio and put it out through headphones attached to the phone if you want.

My aging Plasma TV suffers from burn-in from static pictures. If left paused for a duration the Roku goes to a screensaver that keeps the whole frame moving. The FreeSat doesn't do this. My Blu Ray player does, but (I think) it retains some static elements.