Roku

Roku made streaming hardware feel ordinary, which is a bigger achievement than it sounds. By our assessment, its strength is the simple role it plays for people who want one place to reach many streaming apps, with Roku players, Roku TV and its ad-supported software platform. The downside is that the experience leans on an interface full of ads and on a business model tied to platform and advertising economics. In practice Roku is about a small box, a TV menu or a built-in system that gets out of the way once set up. It sits between the old cable habit and the app-first streaming world, and it helped make that handoff normal. Compared with more expensive home-theater gear, it is blunt rather than luxurious. The US base fits a company that turned streaming into a very practical living-room tool.