One customer's opinion, delivered at a volume the television will not let them adjust.
Every company has hold music. At most companies it is a placeholder — the sound of a problem being routed toward a person who can fix it. Here it started to feel like the destination.
I was escalated. Escalation is a wonderful word. It implies altitude. What it delivered was a lateral move into a nicer-sounding job title with the same amount of authority, which is to say the authority to describe a process rather than participate in one.
I was told the issue would go to the engineers. I asked how. That question, it turns out, is the trapdoor. Every support script survives right up until someone asks for the mechanism, and then you get to watch a professional improvise in real time.
Good support ends with a fix. This ended with a vocabulary lesson.
Apple's platform is closed and it is annoying, and in exchange the thing works and keeps working. That is the deal. You can dislike the deal. It is at least a deal.
This is closed the other way: locked down like a premium platform, staffed like a group project the week before it's due. The remote has buttons that cannot be reassigned to anything you own. The home screen is arranged in an order nobody in your house chose. Somewhere in the settings there is a toggle whose label is a complete sentence and whose function is a mystery.
It has the confidence of a 2018 YouTube Rewind: enormous production budget, zero contact with the people it was made for, and a final cut that only makes sense if you assume the audience was a slide in a deck.
There is no boycott to sign and no mailing list to join. There is a checkout page, and it is the only vote that gets counted in a quarter.
This is one person's opinion after one bad run. Read reviews, check return policies, and buy from a retailer that will take the thing back without a case number. Suggested starting points:
Cheap and honest about it. Roku's software is not elegant, but it is competent and it does not act surprised to see you.
Expensive, opinionated, occasionally overbearing — and a support org that can actually find an engineer when it needs one.
Varies by model, so read the specific review, not the brand. The floor is higher than you'd guess.
The best fix for bad TV software is refusing to use it. Buy the panel, plug in a box you control, never open the home screen again.
The picture problem was never the interesting part. Panels fail. Software ships broken. Every manufacturer on that list above has shipped a bad unit to somebody's living room.
What separated this one was being walked, patiently and professionally, to the exact spot where the process ends and then being congratulated on arriving. A case number. A warm tone. A promise to pass it along a channel that nobody would describe out loud.
So: the hold music wasn't the placeholder. It was the whole product, and I finally heard it all the way through. Great sound quality, actually. Better than the TV's.