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Comment by stallmanite | Hacker News Reader

I have to chime in with another recommendation for Pluto. The app is noticeably snappier than anything else on my 3 different models of Roku. (Weird since it’s free and Hulu, HBO, Sling et al should have plenty of money for development.). Sling especially has dark patterns selling DVR space and loses audio sync constantly. Pluto is rock solid by comparison.

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Roku tends to have poor quality (outsourced) apps when companies have invested in a multiplatform system - brightscript doesn’t interoperate well with anything else so its usually an outsourced project.

Funny. The Roku MLB.tv app blows every other platform out of the water.

MLB has a world-class engineering team [1] so that's not a surprise. You might even say they're in a different league than other content providers.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-strea...

Ha. Their Roku app is the best non-live viewing experience I've ever experienced for any sporting event: during live games you can jump to specific innings/plays, change audio feeds between TV announcers, radio announcers, and stadium-only... really impressive.

MLBAM must have done that in house. I'm not saying its impossible to do a good Roku app, it definitely is, and frequently its going to be faster because the language is fairly single purpose. But a roku team tends to need its own explicit resources. I've heard of a lot of gnashing of teeth from colleagues walking up to it, though I haven't played with it yet myself.

You think the Roku version of MLB is significantly better than, say, the Apple TV version of MLB? Why?

Better features.

Never used the Apple TV version. But I have used the web and Android versions, and the Roku player blows them out of the water.

My only complaint is that it completely freezes my firestick at least once a day. We plan on upgrading to something else so this shouldn't be a concern soon.

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