Roku 4 review: best way to get the most 4K video today, but isn't worth the extra money for most buyers
Roku is finally making the jump to 4K … Caleb Denison / Digital Trends : Roku 4 review … I still love my Roku 3 very much …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Roku 4 arrives a year after the Roku 3 set the class benchmark with its voice-search remote, and Roku's pre-order listing at $129 with a faster quad-core chip and a "follow" feature framed 4K as the upgrade hook. Digital Trends' verdict — best way to stream 4K today, but not worth the extra money for most buyers — lands on the same fault line CNET flagged with the Roku 3: incremental hardware gains against a device most people replace rarely.
The verdict isn't isolated. A year on, Tom's Guide finds even the $30 Roku Express sluggish yet recommends it on channel selection alone, Engadget calls the Chromecast Ultra's 4K improvement marginal over 1080p with limited content, and the Roku Ultra's 3,500-channel catalog becomes the real selling point rather than resolution. Across the category, reviewers keep concluding the cheap tier wins.
First-order effects
- Roku's $129 ask now competes against its own $99-and-under Roku 3, which Digital Trends says still satisfies most households — the 4K buyer pool at launch is enthusiasts with 4K TVs, not the installed base.
- Google's Chromecast Ultra enters the same trap: reviewers judge its 4K HDR quality improvement insufficient to displace the $35 Chromecast, leaving both premium tiers without a mainstream case.
Second-order effects
- With premium boxes failing the value test, Roku and Google both push differentiation down-market — Roku leans on channel breadth (culminating in the Ultra's catalog pitch) rather than resolution, and budget models like the $30 Express become the default recommendation despite weak performance.
- Content scarcity compounds the hardware problem: reviewers cite limited 4K libraries as the reason upgrades stall, shifting pressure onto studios and services to fill the pipes before anyone needs a new box.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming-player economics invert: hardware becomes near-commodity at $30-$35, and platform owners monetize through what runs on the device — consistent with Roku's later results, where advertising ($673M, up 25%) and subscription revenue ($548M, up 26%) dwarf any plausible hardware margin, turning the player into customer-acquisition cost.
- That structure favors whoever owns the channel store and the ad stack, not whoever ships the fastest quad-core chip — a shift that would eventually make resolution-based upgrade cycles a losing sales argument for device makers.
The trend: Streaming hardware is commoditizing downward while platform owners like Roku convert cheap players into audiences for advertising and subscription revenue.