Roku has made, in my mind, a horrible mistake by trying to be more than a hardware vendor. My first Roku was great -- select the app you want, play video. A lot of the streaming services were very immature and had terrible UIs; Netflix's was particularly good and Amazon remains one of the worst. They had a headphone jack on the remote (genius!) so that I could listen to content while other people in my household slept.

Then on the next generation, they started requiring a credit card on registration (boy did I have to hunt to find out how to set it up without that). I am perfectly capable of getting credentials for the services in question, why would I ever put my credit card information with a service where I never expect to use it?

Then they started peppering the UI with ads. The net effect here was basically just to make the interface less navigable by wasting a bunch of space advertising channels and programs on a device I paid for?

Finally they added a bunch of buttons to the remote to take you to specific services, which I only every use mistakenly, and of course includes "Rdio", where all I get when that button gets mashed is a message saying "this service no longer exists". Their interface with the big tiles is very well done; I don't need these shortcuts.

I would gladly pay extra for a version of the Roku that cut all of these features; like Amazon hardware and the "with sponsored content" where I can pay an extra $20 to get the vanilla version. It's still the best of the devices I've used (Amazon Fire Stick/Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast) but it's a shame they keep trying to suck more ongoing revenue out of it.