I don’t think I’m alone when I confess that my streaming strategy is a mess. In fact, calling it a strategy is overly kind. I pay for a number of services, all of which cost more every year, and I still keep hearing of shows I want to see on streamers I don’t have. Maybe there are people who carefully analyze what’s available and keep unsubscribing and resubscribing, then methodically bingeing what they miss and deactivating again. Please do not sit those annoyingly competent people beside me at a dinner party. I’m just barely getting by.
Worse, my precarious balance was wholly overturned a few weeks ago when the Netflix movie I was watching suddenly flickered, and, with brutal abruptness, quit entirely, dumping me into the anodyne pink abyss of the home screen of my Roku-powered smart TV. I did what anyone would do in that situation, opening the Netflix app again to try and resume the movie. I didn’t get to see another full minute before the app crashed again. Well, when in doubt, reboot. I pulled the plug on the TV, waited a minute, and started over. This time I was able to complete the movie. But two days later the same thing happened again. And later that week, I had the same problem with the Amazon Prime app. For the past few weeks, to watch a movie on either of those services has meant pulling out the power cord and rebooting the television before pressing the Play button.
I resolved to dig deeper into this—not just so I could more easily watch May/December but because problems like this are not just isolated glitches. They are a core part of our reality, the alluring yet often finicky digital infrastructure that surrounds us like a spiderweb. The TV is manufactured by the Chinese consumer electronics giant TCL, but I intuited that this was a software issue. The Roku website offered a number of options to resolve system crashes, including updating the device’s operating system and reinstalling apps. None of that worked. So I began exploring the discussion groups in the Roku “customer community.”
Roku is among many consumer tech companies that crowdsource problems like this, in hopes that people can share solutions without consuming valuable employee or engineering resources. The vibe in these rooms is often that of strangers stuck in an elevator together. Sometimes they develop bonds and brainstorm solutions together. But ultimately they’re held together only by their shared predicament. Now here I was, with my elevator packed.
Several discussion threads seemed to address the problem I had. One started early last year and went on for more than a dozen screens of increasingly desperate comments and complaints. “I’m at the point where I think there needs to be some legal intervention,” one commenter said. Every so often someone seemingly representing Roku would drop in—like the voice of a first responder coming from the elevator control panel—and ask people to provide information about their TV and software status. They never returned with any fix or advice.
My favorite remedy from the end users left to commiserate or concoct their own fixes came from someone listed as a “retired moderator.” It suggested we try a procedure that resembled a cheat code in a video game: Go to the home screen. Make sure you’re on the home menu item. Press the home button 5 times. Press up once. Press rewind twice. Press fast-forward twice. The screen will freeze up for 30 seconds, then the device will reboot. And the problem will go kaput.
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