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April 9, 2019 10:53 pm

Roku Is No Longer a Neutral Platform After Today's Roku OS 9.1 Update

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In the past, Roku seemed to be more of a neutral platform compared with streaming media player rivals like Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV. The company gave everyone else's content equal footing through its add-on channels and in Roku search, as it had nothing of its own to promote. That's changing with the rollout of Roku OS 9.1, beginning today. The update adds a feature that automatically plays back The Roku Channel's movies and TV shows at times; another that better showcases the channel's free content in genre-focused searches; and one that introduces a new navigation menu with offers for other Roku products. These features arrive alongside other changes, like a new guest mode and easier sign-in to subscriptions. Among the more innocuous changes are the new guest mode and automatic account linking. Roku in January first announced an "auto sign out mode," which allowed guests to sign into subscription channels using their own accounts instead of the Roku owner's credentials. And guests could specify when their credentials would expire on that device -- a useful feature in particular for Airbnb operators. Today, "auto sign out mode" is being rebranded as "guest mode," and can now be enabled or disabled on select devices. It also now allows Roku owners to sign out the guests themselves. With Automatic Account Link, Roku users won't have to re-enter their credentials when activating a new Roku player or Roku TV -- the subscription data will simply copy over from their existing account. Roku will also be promoting its own content and products to users. For example, when users search for "comedy" or "action," the content is displayed in a layout similar to Netflix with large image thumbnails and rows you scroll through horizontally. TechCrunch notes that while Netflix "lets you drill down into genres, Roku instead is organizing search results by whether the content is free, subscription, on-demand or 4K." The second row of content points users to Roku's "free" ad-supported content. You can view the release notes for Roku OS 9.1 here.

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