Roku doesn’t want you to consider it the “budget” TV brand you find at all-you-can-shop brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart or Target. The company wants a piece of that premium TV pie, even as it already reigns as the top TV streaming platform for the U.S. and Canada. The company has announced its plans to expand its TV offerings by adding three new high-end options later this year.
The Roku Pro Series TVs will come in 55-, 65-, and 75-inch sizes. There’s no concrete pricing yet, but Roku says they’ll be competitively priced under $1,500. The Pro TVs are backlit by Mini-LED with 4K QLED resolutions, local dimming, and “enhanced audio technology,” so the sound is full and booming. Roku’s Pro lineup is designed to appear flat and flush against the wall—from the teaser images, the Roku Pro line looks modeled after the Samsung Frame.
The Pro TVs will introduce the new Roku Smart Picture, which will launch on the platform later this year. Smart Picture was developed by Roku’s “Picture Quality Tuning Team.” The ability detects what’s playing on-screen using—what else?—AI, plus available data from other streaming platforms to adjust the TV picture for an “optimized viewing experience.” The idea is to take away the guesswork of digging into the TV settings to set the resolution and picture tone, and it sounds like it’ll be helpful for the technophobic folks who may have chosen Roku for ease of use.
Last year, Roku announced it would make its TVs with the help of third-party manufacturing partners called Roku Select and Roku Plus. There are additional TVs launching from this lineup later this year alongside the Pro series, though details remain slim.
Roku is also using its tenth anniversary to remind us that it’s still the number one streaming platform in the U.S., according to various surveys on market share. There are better-looking budget TVs out there than Roku’s offerings, but its platform-agnostic approach has helped it remain a mainstay in a region where streaming is the dominant way people watch TV.
