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Comment by merrywhether | Hacker News Reader

What they really need to do is layoff BrightScript. They are certainly big in the streaming device space, but not enough to justify having a proprietary language. The rest of the industry is coalescing around portable apps based on web tech while Roku is derided and only begrudgingly supported due to their current market share. But Roku’s market share has been relatively flat while FireTV has grown to equal them, and Roku should be terrified of the cliff BrightScript puts them on. Every company would love to kill their oddball BrightScript app as soon as possible and that’s a dangerous position for a company without a defensible moat. See their lost battle with YouTube to see how much clout they actually have.

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Having mentioned a brief Roku maintenance rotation on my resume I got to see how desperate the recruiters for BrightScript devs are.

I did jokingly consider diving into it as a lucrative niche skill, like maintaining Cobol apps.

I think COBOL devs don’t get paid all that much. They just train fresh grads in cheap markets. The premium wages for COBOL were certainly a thing in the Y2K days.

Did you get anyone interested?

There's a huge opportunity for a Whatever->BrightScript transpiler. I briefly went down the path myself before declaring it too big to be a hobby project. It would however, massively improve the developer experience and be an easy acqui-hire op for anyone that likes transpiler design.

I did once create a GitHub repo to write a BS target for Haxe. Called it HorseScript, extending the BS pun.

But, like you, I couldn't justify the time.

To be fair, not being webshit is part of why their UI is usable (if not great) on low-end hardware.

BrightScript does suck, though—but it also already exists, and I doubt maintaining it's all that hard. Used to work on a dual-platform mobile app engine that was probably on par, difficulty-wise, with maintaining & developing BrightScript—that only needed like 3.5 devs, and not at coastal US wages.

Meanwhile, the Big Boys get a C++(?) API, as I understand it. I assume that's why some of them behave weird or are glitchy, but do look a lot like the same apps on other platforms.

[EDIT] However, they could probably do a good job making a comparably-snappy UI with JavaScript, as long as they didn't drag HTML and CSS along for the ride. Kinda like the JavaScript API on tvOS.

> To be fair, not being webshit is part of why their UI is usable (if not great) on low-end hardware.

I have a TV with Roku built-in. It ran great when I got it in 2020, but it has gotten slower and slower to the point of being unusable. I'm not even talking about apps, but the Roku home screen itself. Apps are even slower and crash all the time, sometimes crashing the TV itself.

On the other hand, I have a Chromecast from 2016 that still runs just as well as it did when I bought it. I'd rather use my phone as a remote and have a movie playing in seconds with the Chromecast than wait 1+ minutes for Hulu or Netflix to even get to their respective home screens with the Roku. I also don't get ads with the Chromecast.

>I have a Chromecast from 2016 that still runs just as well as it did when I bought it.

Which, in my experience, is better than the new Chromecast with Android TV. I switched to it from an old school Chromecast and was just astounded at how badly the menus performed. Like the entire role of this device is to operate my TV, it's 2023, they can't make it do that without the UI animations dragging and occasionally crashing altogether? Not to mention the ads, ads everywhere, "recommendations" all over the home screen, crammed in every available space, and no doubt dragging performance themselves.

I switched to an Apple TV and it's a bit better, but there's still a full-screen "recommendation" video at the top of the home screen and it still doesn't run perfectly, which sorry not sorry, would be my expectation for such an incredibly simple UI in this great year of 2023.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but is there a single company making a set top box today that #1 consistently performs well in software and #2 isn't riddled with advertising disguised as "recommendations" for content I would never watch? Is that Roku? I haven't used one in years.

> Which, in my experience, is better than the new Chromecast with Android TV.

Similar experience with the Shield, running Android. I shouldn't have tried to cheap out, and should have gone straight for the AppleTV. It's not perfect, but it's by far the best high-spec streamer box I've used. The Shield was glitchy, crashy, dropped animation frames constantly despite running on strong hardware so looked/felt pretty bad, and was full of ads. Plus IMO its menus and general system navigation were a lot worse than tvOS.

On the other hand, the Shield is still the best device by far for streaming GeForce experience and is the only way to get Nvidia’s HD to 4k upscaling tech, which I’ve heard is very impressive with sources like YouTube.

Seems like there really isn’t a truly exceptional product in this space right now. The AppleTV is closest but I think it shines more in comparison to the rest of the market than it does on its own. How I wish there was a good open source solution that I could just install on a raspberry pi.

> The AppleTV is closest but I think it shines more in comparison to the rest of the market than it does on its own.

IMO true for most of Apple's product line. They're the best because it looks like nobody else is even seriously trying, not because they're, like, perfect and never screw up or do bad things.

Apple TV is the best currently available. I think you're underestimating the complexity required to make these devices work well.

I'm sure I am, but my experience as an end user is that a device I expect to function within a pretty limited domain struggles to perform within that limited domain, which is frustrating for me.

If it is so complex, then that makes me more disappointed to see the development resources (and device horsepower) allocated to inserting promotional content into the homepage. I wonder how much more consistently TvOS could perform if a team of engineers was not focused on making sure I am forced to preview a Bruce Springsteen video when I turn the tube on after work.

OS adware is definitely below my expectations from Apple. I expect that stuff from a Google device, but it's a real letdown that can't be disabled on a $150 Apple box. I only ever click on it by accident.

It’s the only TV platform I’ve seen that’s truly 4K. All the others have a 1080p UI upscaled to 4K. Only the 4K videos they play are truly 4K.

Oh, yeah, it's definitely possible to put Roku on hardware that's so incredibly shit that it runs poorly. And Roku's software (like everyone else's) has definitely been bloating for a long time. I discovered that when I bought a Hisense, because I needed a new TV and Costco didn't sell the previous brand of dirt-cheap Chinese Roku TV I'd bought before. God damn did that brand cheap out, the other brand's older TV that cost the same performed so much better. It even crashed sometimes, seemingly from OOM-like pressure, which I'd never once seen happen on the older one.

But it's also the case that decently-performing Roku devices exist running on hardware that surely wouldn't do very well if its "apps" were Webtech-based. JavaScript, sure, that could probably be brought in (and would surely be an improvement over BrightScript, as far as dev-ex) but a whole browser engine? Nah, they'd have to greatly increase their min specs, and their whole niche is "runs twice as well as Android-based TV UIs, on half the hardware".

In my experience at least with somewhat newer low end smart tvs, Roku is far and away a better experience than Android or Fire TV. Even higher end TVs with Android TV are a laggy mess. If you're looking for a cheap bedroom TV I would only choose Roku.

I have 3 standalone Rokus and 1 TCL TV with Roku. I'm happy with all of them. I've avoided the cheapest Rokus because they are slow, so the mid-range to the top range ones, along the built-in on the TV, are fairly responsive.

Better yet, I'm only choosing dumb TVs (if possible) in the future.

I have a standalone Roku, third generation, so it is sitting on ten years now. It's dandy.

My suspicion has been that building in anything into a television is fraught. Dumb TVs + some kind of box for the win.

As a counter data point. I have 2 TVs with Roku built in. One from 2020 and one from 2018. Each is still very responsive and stable.

> their UI is usable (if not great) on low-end hardware.

This is not at all my experience using Roku.

Devices so bad that even Roku runs poorly on them do exist.

Zero of them would do better if Roku switched to webtech for its applications.

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