Most homes have one: the older TV in the bedroom or the guest room, perfectly good as a screen, whose built-in apps stopped being pleasant to use years ago. Replacing the set makes little sense when a stick in the HDMI port does the job, and the Roku Streaming Stick HD is cut from $39.99 to $19.99 on Amazon, a 50% drop. No Prime membership is required, and the stick ships with Roku’s voice remote.
Powered by the TV, Hidden Behind It
What sets this stick apart from older streaming dongles is how little of it you see. Roku says the body is slim enough to leave the neighboring HDMI ports free, and that it draws its power from the TV itself, with no wall outlet and no extra cord. For a television mounted on a wall with a single socket already taken, or a kitchen set squeezed between two cupboards, that is the difference between a clean installation and a cable hanging down the paint.
The remote is the other half of the product. It controls the Roku interface, but also the TV’s power and volume, so the original remote can go in a drawer and stay there. Voice control is included, for searching a title or starting playback without typing letter by letter on an on-screen keyboard. I’d count that as a real advantage for the people who usually get the spare TV, namely kids and visiting parents, who shouldn’t need a tutorial to find a cartoon or the evening news.
Software is the main argument for choosing Roku over a TV’s own menus. The company describes itself as America’s number one TV streaming platform by hours streamed, citing a Hypothesis Group study, and the home screen remains a plain grid of apps that anyone understands within a minute. The popular subscription services are there, alongside free movies, shows and live channels, including local news and sports. Setup takes a few minutes, according to Roku. The product name also mentions long-range Wi-Fi, which is welcome for exactly the kind of room this stick tends to end up in, the one farthest from the router. For households that already use Amazon’s assistant, the stick is certified as working with Alexa, so an Echo speaker can turn the TV on by voice.
Travel is a use the listing pushes, and it holds up. Slipped into a suitcase, the stick turns a hotel or rental TV into your own, with your accounts already signed in, which avoids typing a password into a stranger’s television and forgetting to log out. One point needs to be clear before buying: this version outputs HD, and the 4K mentioned in parts of Amazon’s listing belongs to the other styles on the page. On a 4K living room TV, I’d pay the difference for one of those. Buyers rate the stick 4.6 out of 5 on Amazon, across more than 24,800 reviews.
In its HD style, the Roku Streaming Stick costs $19.99 on Amazon, against a list price of $39.99, with free returns and no Prime condition. The same page lists the 4K version at $34 and the 4K model with Dolby Vision at $44.99.