Roku Streaming Stick - 2 Pack Price: $54.99 Shipping Options:: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 1-2 business days (Wednesday, May 24 to Thursday, May 25) + transit Condition: Factory Reconditioned
I’m a huge fan of the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. I think the interface is so much better, the response so much snappier, etc.
But I learned something this past weekend. The Roku stick seems to handle low-bandwidth conditions significantly better. Staying at my son’s house in rural Indiana, with meager DSL speeds, I tried using the Fire TV Stick I keep in my suitcase for streaming while traveling. All I got was an awful lot of pausing to buffer, start/stopping, etc.
Well, turned out my son had a Roku stick attached to the TV. We switched to that, and didn’t have another pause all weekend. Of course the quality had been lowered, but that’s actually pretty tolerable so long as the video keeps playing without stopping.
So I’m ordering this and tossing one in my luggage. I’ll keep with the Amazon products at home, but I’m switching to Roku for the road.
I used one of these in a not-often-used viewing area (probably a few hours on the weekend), and had only two problems. The first problem was that the media player didn’t support streams from my Homerun HD tuner, whereas the Roku on my other TV did.
The other, and much bigger problem came from the remote. It’s not IR (which makes sense, because the stick will probably be behind your TV or receiver), so it was constantly trying to connect and keep it’s Bluetooth connection to the stick alive. This meant that every single week, I’d either have to replace the 2 AAA batteries, or remember to remove the batteries when I was done. Neither were really acceptable solutions, so I bought a better Roku box, and now just keep the stick in my suitcase for travel… it can really be a lifesaver in a hotel.
Very strange, my roku stick remote goes into a sleep like state where I have to click a button once to kind of wake it up and then again before the roku will react. I imagine that this is what prevents it from killing the batteries with a constant connection. Also, I turn my tv off and the the roku is powered by the tv so the roku turns off when the tv does. Do you have the roku powered externally to the tv? It may be that by having the roku on all the time, it is keeping the remote in a more active state… I have been using my roku stick for 6+ months (i think I got it on black friday last year) and am still on the original batteries from the box.
Something is wrong with your remote. I’ve had one of these for 4 months or so in my bedroom where I watch tv maybe 3 hours a week, and haven’t had to change the batteries once. In fact, I can tell that it goes into some type of sleep mode, because when I first turn the tv on, I have to press a button on the remote at least twice to get it to work.
Excellent question, as the spec tab doesn’t have a (2) next to what is in the box. If you got two sticks and two remotes, you would think it would have Roku Stick (2) and Roku Remote (2) in the description.