Roku announces redesigned home screen
San Jose-based Roku unveiled its platform’s new user interface for smart TVs on Wednesday. The company bills the refreshed software as “backed by years of consumer insights [which] leads to less time searching, more time streaming.”
“Today, Roku unveiled a new Home Screen that introduces a more dynamic, smarter experience and will reach over 100 million streaming households soon. With more relevant recommendations and faster pathways to content, the new Roku Home Screen reduces friction, maintains Roku’s signature simplicity, and helps viewers find their next favorite show with ease,” Roku wrote in its press release. “Today’s advancements mark the first significant update of the Roku Home Screen in over a decade. Guided by deep behavioral insights and viewer input, this update ensures every change is grounded in what users actually do, need, and value. The new personalized Home Screen tackles the biggest challenges in streaming, while offering a tailored, content-forward way to start watching.”
An overwhelming number of users, 82%, reported they “would love if they turned on their TV and the show they wanted to watch was right on their Home Screen,” adding the UI was built to do just that. The company also says the new Home Screen is meant to “[recommend] content based on your interests and helping you start watching faster.” Notably, and predictably, there’s an AI element: Roku says it’s leveraging its own intelligence models to “pick the best one for each viewer every time they turn on their TV.” There are “billions” of possible Home Screen combinations, Roku said.
“When we set out to rethink the Home Screen, we knew we should listen to the people who use it every day. So we talked to the viewers, we tested extensively, and we pushed until the design and the data lined up for a meaningful update,” Anthony Wood, Roku’s founder and CEO, said in a statement for the announcement. “Now, our new Home Screen puts entertainment at the center of everything, while staying true to Roku’s simple, intuitive roots. More than 100 million households will feel the difference the moment they turn on their TV—and it opens up a better, more powerful experience for our partners as well.”
The UI is rolling out “across all Roku TVs and streaming devices” in the United States.
Prior to getting my LG C3 OLED in January 2025, my living room television was the critically-acclaimed 2020 TCL 6-Series, which uses Mini-LED. That TV runs on Roku OS, which was fine—simple and straightforward and mostly unobtrusive—but I set the TV to automatically boot to my Apple TV 4K anyway. There’s merit in Roku OS from an accessibility perspective if you can’t afford an Apple TV box—again, it’s easy to grok—but I’m inclined to agree with Jason Snell’s take from March of last year when he wrote in part “Roku’s primary interface is a generic series of tiles. The whole thing feels dated, cheap, and generic.” Although I haven’t used one of Roku’s bespoke streaming devices in many years, I can say the Roku apps on that old TCL set were downright pokey in terms of performance. Say what you will for Apple’s ostensible inattentiveness towards tvOS compared to its brethren, the Apple TV’s hardware has never once felt sluggish or stifled. By contrast, the off-the-shelf processors powering Roku’s streamers barely can pass muster compared to the elite performance of the Apple TV 4K. I joke it’s over-engineered, but the delta between Roku’s chips is striking.
Roku posted a video showing off its new Home Screen. There’s a blog post too.
