I purchased the Roku Streambar from Amazon.co.uk for 99.99GBP on the 7th June 2021 for my parents, delivered 10th of June. SKU #9102EU.

I contributed a review to Amazon but I somehow failed the Amazon Community Guidelines without naming which rule I violated. 🤷 Furthermore Amazon deleted my content contribution. Thankfully they teased the beginning of the review in the rejection email:

Now to recall what my review:

• ~40s to start watch BBC1 Live is quite a disappointing UX. I complained to the BBC about the UX and they recommended {restart,update,reinstall} of the App … I think they missed the point.
• When you turn off the Roku whilst watching BBC1, you have to login from scratch, no quick resume. Agonising!
• No chromecast support surprisingly which makes Youtube quite painful
• Airplay is unstable as any other third party software (same experience as LG WebOS). If you enjoy Apple Airplay, my advice, you must buy an Apple TV!
• The sound is good, but it’s not as good as the SONOS for midrange sound / music. Voice is nice and clear.
• BBC looks better than it does over Freeview Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), since it’s in HD
• My parents Internet connection is via A&A and I have a subnet to ourselves. I.e. we don’t use NAT, however the Roku app doesn’t work unless it’s NATed!
• The Samsung TV UE46C6500 that it’s connected to doesn’t support HDMI ARC, so I was very happy to see the included SPDIF audio cable… nice!
• The Roku remote control looks good at first, but then you have to hold down the magnifying glass icon to do a voice search?! WHAT?
• The voice search is pretty hopeless
• The UI is definitely not intuitive from Home and I can’t figure how to remap the icons

Support

Roku support was disappointing. I wrote to Roku saying I followed their advice upon https://support.roku.com/en-us/article/360017961074 and it doesn’t work, but they replied with a boilerplate response with … the very same url https://support.roku.com/en-us/article/360017961074 🤦

Earlier I (innocently) asked /r/roku about watching German TV and I got banned for 15 days. Bit disappointing…

Later I found out about https://www.youtv.de/produkte so I am looking into that to watch German TV instead of receiving satellite television via Astra 1M.

Conclusion

As a technologist, I am underwhelmed / depressed about IP TV. For my parents, it allows them to watch BBC Iplayer in the kitchen with better sound, so they’re happy.