The next software update from Roku for TVs running the company’s media-player software contains something more exciting than the usual “bug fixes and performance improvements”: a pause button for broadcast television.
It would be a stretch to say this “Live TV Pause” feature will make a Roku TV a TiVo. But users will find themselves with the cheapest poor man’s DVR yet, requiring no additional investment beyond a USB flash drive with 16GB or more of storage — which will cost you about $5 and change these days. Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work with cable or satellite TV, just your average over-the-air broadcasters.
Roku’s new feature invites two questions: Shouldn’t this have happened a while ago? And why doesn’t this also let you put cable or satellite TV on hold while you hit the restroom or grab a beer?
Why only now?
Live TV Pause, which will let you freeze a broadcast for up to 90 minutes on Ruku TVs (but not Roku’s standalone players), doesn’t exactly represent a breakthrough innovation. Pausing live video and letting it buffer to a storage device, like a USB stick or hard drive, is Streaming Video 101.
And yet “smart TVs” that ship with the ability to play and pause video from dozens of streaming services haven’t offered the same option for broadcast TV channels.
So if you just want to pause a live cable or satellite program, you have to get a full-fledged DVR. Historically, that’s been an expensive proposition: Either you pay $20 or so a month to your cable or satellite provider to rent its DVR, or you buy a TiVo (TIVO) for $200 or more and an additional $15 a month in service fees.
(The market for DVRs might be a little more diverse had TiVo not sued so many other firms for allegedly infringing broad patents on time-shifting video — a campaign that, it said in a 2015 filing, had yielded more than $1.6 billion in court awards and licensing payments.)
Roku’s pause-only feature is unlikely to deter potential TiVo buyers already eyeing its 4K-capable Bolt DVR or cheaper, broadcast-only DVRs like TiVo’s $399, lifetime-service-included Roamio and Channel Master’s $249 fee-free DVR.
But most TVs that ship with Roku’s software — an increasingly important part of its business— aren’t aimed at the high-end market anyway. They provide a good value to budget-minded shoppers, and they’ve drawn praise from the likes of Consumer Reports and the Wirecutter. This new software update makes those sets a little more attractive for essentially free.
So even if this pause button seems like an overdue addition, give Roku credit for making it happen when nobody else has.