Gadgetory

hi there David Katz Meyer from CNET and next to me is the Roku TV this television is basically a Roku platform built into the TV it's kind of a competitor because existing Smart TVs from Samsung LG and the like this particular TV is manufactured by Chinese maker TCL the Roku TV platform will also come out on Hisense a little bit later this year so those two makers are going to debut the Roku TV platform we first saw this at CES and we really think it's very cool it actually just looks exactly as cool as we saw at CES it's really fast we played with it a little bit this is a pre-production version but we expect to get the normal production version a little bit to review it moves around really quickly like Roku but the real benefit here is you get all of those Roku apps 1700 apps in total right now and growing everyday more apps than pretty much any other platform another great thing about this platform is you can move around and arrange the icons really easily you can set up the apps that you like at the top and move the other ones around that you don't like toward the bottom of course you can install and uninstall apps very easily and it really is a very easy platform to use unlike a lot of the Smart TV platforms out there another big benefit of the Roku platform is the search the universal search that hits a lot of different platforms you can actually find out when you're searching on an app whether you have Netflix for example and not have to pay for the Netflix movie that you're getting for free as a Netflix subscriber so that cross-platform search works extremely well and again is a kind of real value add with roku compared to a lot of their platforms out there like chromecast Apple TV Fire TV and of course the myriad Smart TV platforms but really the extra thing we got here is this TV has Roku built right into the television itself so one of the cool things you get is instead of a normal TV menu fire up you have to actually go to the Smart TV section right here the Smart TV section is part of the interface so you can see along the top here you have all the inputs cable TV Xbox antenna right along the top and the cable box even shows a live feed of what's coming into that HDMI input of course you can move those inputs around and adjust them and even rename them so it's all sort of an integrated experience and it kind of works just as well as when people watch TV now so right when you turn on the television you get all these inputs all of these apps immediately right on the interface right there and it's a very simple very straightforward arrangement again in counterpoint to many of the many of the more complex smart TV interfaces of course it doesn't have a lot of that Smart TV bells and whistles we've seen on some of these other TVs like motion control and built-in cameras and a web browser that stuff that you'll never use we really don't think that's a big deal we think really what people are going to be using this TV for Smart TV for in general is streaming video and audio and again some of these things you can do with this include plex where you can actually get audio and video services from your home network so you can stream those files pretty easily as well if you have a plex server set up again all the great capabilities of Roku built into a TV itself this TV is coming out in the very near future and we've actually heard some extremely aggressive price points so again they're going to be competing right against those wheelhouse TVs like the videos and Samsung's of the world with their own built-in Smart TV platforms with the added advantage of Roku that's a quick look at the Roku TV from TCL and Hisense I'm David Katz Martinez