I don’t think I’m alone when I confess that my streaming strategy is a mess. In fact, calling it a strategy is overly kind. I pay for a number of services, all of which cost more every year, and I still keep hearing of shows I want to see on streamers I don’t have. Maybe there are people who carefully analyze what’s available and keep unsubscribing and resubscribing, then methodically bingeing what they miss and deactivating again. Please do not sit those annoyingly competent people beside me at a dinner party. I’m just barely getting by.
Worse, my precarious balance was wholly overturned a few weeks ago when the Netflix movie I was watching suddenly flickered, and, with brutal abruptness, quit entirely, dumping me into the anodyne pink abyss of the home screen of my Roku-powered smart TV. I did what anyone would do in that situation, opening the Netflix app again to try and resume the movie. I didn’t get to see another full minute before the app crashed again. Well, when in doubt, reboot. I pulled the plug on the TV, waited a minute, and started over. This time I was able to complete the movie. But two days later the same thing happened again. And later that week, I had the same problem with the Amazon Prime app. For the past few weeks, to watch a movie on either of those services has meant pulling out the power cord and rebooting the television before pressing the Play button.
I resolved to dig deeper into this—not just so I could more easily watch May/December but because problems like this are not just isolated glitches. They are a core part of our reality, the alluring yet often finicky digital infrastructure that surrounds us like a spiderweb. The TV is manufactured by the Chinese consumer electronics giant TCL, but I intuited that this was a software issue. The Roku website offered a number of options to resolve system crashes, including updating the device’s operating system and reinstalling apps. None of that worked. So I began exploring the discussion groups in the Roku “customer community.”
Roku is among many consumer tech companies that crowdsource problems like this, in hopes that people can share solutions without consuming valuable employee or engineering resources. The vibe in these rooms is often that of strangers stuck in an elevator together. Sometimes they develop bonds and brainstorm solutions together. But ultimately they’re held together only by their shared predicament. Now here I was, with my elevator packed.
Several discussion threads seemed to address the problem I had. One started early last year and went on for more than a dozen screens of increasingly desperate comments and complaints. “I’m at the point where I think there needs to be some legal intervention,” one commenter said. Every so often someone seemingly representing Roku would drop in—like the voice of a first responder coming from the elevator control panel—and ask people to provide information about their TV and software status. They never returned with any fix or advice.
My favorite remedy from the end users left to commiserate or concoct their own fixes came from someone listed as a “retired moderator.” It suggested we try a procedure that resembled a cheat code in a video game: Go to the home screen. Make sure you’re on the home menu item. Press the home button 5 times. Press up once. Press rewind twice. Press fast-forward twice. The screen will freeze up for 30 seconds, then the device will reboot. And the problem will go kaput.
Why didn’t I think of that? It’s obvious! Several members of our little community tried it and reported that the problem was solved! But over the next few days and weeks, they slunk back in shame. The problem had returned. Finally on December 12, a Roku “community monitor” weighed in with something besides a request for information. “Worry no more,” they wrote, “as we will be requesting additional reinforcement from the relevant Roku team and find the best resolution possible.” After all this time, the cavalry was coming.
I hadn’t gotten to reading that belated promise when I contacted Roku, not just to address my problem but to find out what’s happening behind the scenes in a situation where frustrated users are steaming on self-help forums instead of streaming with the product. The PR person heard my description and came back with some answers. She spoke on background, which means I can provide the gist of what she said without actually quoting her.
Yes, it’s a Roku issue. It was occuring in other hardware makers besides TCL. Even though the exact problem I had was being reported a year ago on the discussion channels, I was told that the bug I was suffering from didn’t appear until November, when a new Roku OS was rolled out. Um, OK, but it certainly sounded like the same situation. Anyway, for some mysterious reason, on a certain limited number of configurations, the OS update triggered a gnarly problem in memory handling. To use a technical term, this screwed up my Netflix and Prime apps. No amount of fiddling on my part would solve the problem—I could install and reinstall the apps all I wanted and it wouldn’t make a difference. And what about that cheat code that had me pressing the home button, the forward button, the backward button and clicking my shoes three times? According to Roku, it’s real—but it’s an obscure way to find out information about system status, not a fix for this bug. Anyway, there is no magic to that incantation. I got the impression that Roku was unhappy that it leaked in the first place.
But as that December post promises, Roku is on it. The team is working on a fix that will be included in the next operating system rollout. Or sooner, if they can pull that off. The spokesperson provided no date, but had me understand that it wouldn’t take a year. Good to know.
Roku did supply me with an on-the-record statement, to be attributed to Sheldon Radford, its director of product management. Here it is, in full:
At Roku, we are committed to ensuring our customers always have a seamless streaming experience. Whether you bought a TV this year, or years ago–you are guaranteed to receive automatic and free software updates, so that you have the most current streaming experience and access to new features. When we encounter any issues, like this one, we address them immediately, and deploy a fix when possible. Once an update is available, the Roku TV will automatically install it, and no further action is needed by the user.
Two words in this statement popped out to me like a flying dinosaur in a mixed-reality headset: when possible. When I flagged this in a subsequent call, Roku reassured me that a fix for my issue will happen. In the worst-case scenario, if the problem won’t be solved in the next OS, sufferers will be provided some incantation to have their televisions backdated to the previous operating system. (Does this mean we’re back to hitting that home button five times?) And if that doesn’t work, which Roku says totally won’t be the case, the company will make sure to make everyone satisfied somehow. The company was ready to satisfy me right away, offering me a new TV. I declined, since they weren’t offering it to everyone whose Netflix was crashing.
I think Roku is dealing in good faith. I’d been happy with my Roku-powered smart TV, until I wasn’t because it kept crashing. I take Roku at its word that it’s working on the problem and might actually fix it. I acknowledge that updating software on a static platform like a television set is a particular challenge. And God knows how common bugs are in software.
In any case, my inability to stream Netflix without resetting the TV every time I watch a movie is a pretty trivial problem. And you know what? Even if I never watched Netflix again, I’d live. Now that Netflix has added advertising to its business model, I’m dreading the day when everyone on the service is exposed to endless commercials, unless we pay even more than the already out-of-control monthly fee. Beef was great, but I’d pass if every 10 minutes it was interrupted by pharma ads.
Nevertheless, my Roku problem is a warning. Artificial intelligence is thrusting us into an era that intertwines our lives with digital technology more than ever. If you think that our current software is complicated, just wait until everything works on neural nets! Even the people who create those are mystified about how they work. And, boy, can things go wrong with that stuff. Just this week, OpenAI suffered a few hours where its chatbots blurted out incoherent comments, evoking the word salad of a stroke victim or the Republican front-runner. And Google had to temporarily stop its Gemini LLM from generating images of people, because of what it called “historical inconsistencies” in how it depicted the diversity of humanity. These are disturbing portents. We’re now in the process of turning over much of our activities to these systems. If they fail, “community discussions” won’t save us.
Digital technology is too damn complicated, and we’re doomed to a life of bug-resolution. That was my observation 30 years ago when I wrote Insanely Great, in a passage spurred by a freezing problem I had with my Macintosh IIcx. As the Mac operating system struggled to handle a complicated ecosystem of extensions, boundary-pushing applications, and data at a scale the original had not imagined, bugs appeared that required Sherlock Holmes–level sleuthing to resolve.
This was the background to my Macintosh troubles: the computer had become more complicated than anyone had imagined. I enacted a short-term fix, stripping the system of possible offenders. I was stepping back in time, making the Mac emulate the simpler, though less useful, computer I once had. As I wiped out Super Boomerang, Background Printing, On Location and Space Saver, I pictured myself as Astronaut Dave in 2001, determinedly yanking out the chips in the supercomputer H.A.L., with the uncomfortable feeling that I was deconstructing a personality. When I finished my Macintosh IIcx was not so atavistic as to sing “Daisy,” but it was, in a Mac sense, no longer itself. On the other hand, it no longer hung.
Some weeks later, I vowed to solve the problem, reactivating the potentially offending pieces of software until the problem reappeared. The culprit was On Location, a searching program that could rifle through the files on a hard disk to find any given phrase or word. ON’s customer support informed me that On Location was normally very sound. But a recent version of a popular program had caused some problems. “Do you have MS Word version 5.1?” he asked me. I sure did.
Oddly, the source of the dispute could be mitigated if I accessed the folder that came with Word entitled “Sample Documents” located a file called “Employment Report” and consigned it to the trash can. I followed his directions and—poof, no more hanging.
Joe asks, “Is there a good hand-crank device for recharging your phone?”
Joe, are you doom-prepping? If the lights really go out, you know that the cell service goes down too, don’t you? But there are instances when your local power might be out, or you’re in the woods or something, and you need a charge. And maybe the extra battery you’ve brought along is also spent. And your car is out of gas, so the automobile cell phone charger won’t work. Here’s a list of great portable chargers, including some heavy-duty ones that can also charge laptops and appliances.
I actually own a solar cell phone charger. It holds a charge that keeps a phone alive, but it takes a while to bounce back when the juice is expended. And of course, you need that sun to shine. As for hand cranks, yes, those exist too. Apparently for as little as $10. You get power, and something of a workout as well. Three minutes of cranking will give you 10 minutes of talk time. Or you can read Plaintext as civilization goes dark.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
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Steven Levy
