The Roku remotes now come with quick launch buttons for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV. You can grab a Streaming Stick 4K for $50 or pay $70 for the Streaming Stick 4K+ that comes with Roku’s rechargeable “Pro” remote. The Streaming Stick 4K is a very solid media player, but I fear Roku still needs to do more to stave off competition from Google. In that regard, the Streaming Stick 4K gets the job done with a few notable caveats, and it’s doing so in a market that’s evolving very fast thanks to new pressure from the likes of Google. So now I have to evaluate the Streaming Stick 4K not as a good upgrade for legacy TV owners but as a viable option for anyone buying a new TV today. Dolby Atmos movies sounded just as good from the Streaming Stick 4K on my system as they did from my Atmos-certified Apple TV 4K. In my experience, I found this to be the case. Roku says there should be no difference in audio quality here, so it didn’t pay for the fees. However, Roku does not need to pay licensing fees if it simply passes through the encoded Atmos data to your AV system to do the decoding on that end. In order to print the Atmos logo on the box, Roku would need to pay Dolby a fee and perform the Atmos decoding process on the streaming device. Roku says this is a licensing issue with Dolby. I asked Roku about this contradiction between its specs page and what the device is actually doing. The Roku Streaming Stick 4K is an HDMI stick that goes into your TV. I confirmed this from the Sonos app for my Arc soundbar, which always indicated the audio output format. I was able to stream content from Disney+, Apple TV+, and Netflix all in Atmos. For the price, this is a pain point but not necessarily a dealbreaker, and I’d be fine recommending the Streaming Stick 4K to anyone who doesn’t need Atmos.īut, uh, the Streaming Stick 4K does support Dolby Atmos. This would mean that the Streaming Stick 4K is intended less for people buying a high-end TV today and more for people who bought an earlier 4K HDR smart TV that doesn’t support Dolby Atmos passthrough to external soundbars (this is the case for lots of great TVs made in 2017, for instance). The official specs for the Streaming Stick 4K, and the comparison tool on Roku’s website, state that the Streaming Stick 4K doesn’t support Dolby Atmos. The addition of Dolby Vision to the Streaming Stick 4K this time around means that the $50 device can fit into basically any 4K HDR TV without leaving functionality on the table, with one apparent exception if you go by Roku’s spec page. In that regard, the new Roku Streaming Stick 4K does that job as well as every Streaming Stick before it, just ticking off more boxes. Stick a Roku on the back that ticks all the boxes your TV can run and never touch that built-in interface again. Think of the visual garbage pumped out to run TVs from Samsung, Vizio, and LG. The reason anyone buys a Roku streaming player is out of a strong disdain for their terrific looking 4K HDR TV’s “smart” interface. Rokus are interesting products to review because they’re refreshingly boring.Įvery year Roku tweaks its lineup to offer a bit of a better value compared to the previous one, and usually, those spec bumps don’t make meaningful waves to warrant buying a new one.
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