this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Roku looks to be seriously tightening its pursestrings. The company’s laying off a full ten percent of its workforce, over 300 employees, in addition to a conducting a number of other cost-cutting measures, as reported by Variety. These job cuts are just the beginning, as Roku’s also removing streaming content, consolidating office space and reducing outside service expenses. The goal here is a major reduction in the year-over-year operating expense growth rate.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My only real issue with Roku is the lack of a decent Ethernet port on them. 100mbit ports are too slow for 2023

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It does feel like antiquated tech but what streaming service uses even 50+mbps streaming? The services I know of (apple, Netflix, Disney) all max out around 30mbps.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Self hosted (jellyfin, Plex) can use more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

But could the decoder keep up? Decoders come in a variety of sizes and I doubt they’d pay the extra cost to put a 120Mbps decoder in the device when no streaming services require it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

100mbps is too slow for 2023

It’s appropriate for the device’s functionality. 4K HDR is at most 40Mbps. If the device supported large local storage and offline playback, you’d have a point. But given the device’s use case as a streaming client, I doubt you’d be able to find any workload that gets close to saturating the network. Even if you could find a content source that was higher than 100Mbps, it’s unlikely the decoder would be able to keep up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bluray rips can be 80mbps+ but I've never had trouble streaming them on any device including roku. Important to remember that the bitrate is an average so some scenes will be well above the advertised bitrate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

bitrate is an average

Yes but that’s why the network and decoder are buffered. It’s also why most content is constrained at encode time to target both an average bitrate and a peak bitrate. A 200% constraint is typical, so you shouldn’t find 4K HDR in the wild at over 80Mbps peak bitrate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The buffers on streaming devices are much smaller on these devices because of how cost reduced they are. You're way overselling how large they are.

Also, 80mbps is actually a pretty common avg bitrate on 4kuhd blurays. You have 100gb of disk to play with and they generally want to use it as much as possible.