General Discussion Roku TV's & devices won't work unless you force accept new terms (1 Viewer)

[chrislong2]

Roku TV's and players for the first time ever as far as I am aware have started forcing users to accept new terms or their Roku TV/roku player basically becomes an unsuable brick - in other words Roku is basically holding their customers ransom. These new terms force all users to give up their right to sue Roku and forces forced arbitration only. There is no option to not accept the terms - you must accept or you seemingly can no longer use your TV / device as it won't let you progress beyond the screen to agree. Deep in the terms, you will find an option to physically mail a letter providing all sorts of identifying information (including receipt for the device) within 30 days of the terms to opt-out. How exactly users with Roku TV's or players that are several years old are supposed to do that isn't explained or clear.

This should be a very disturbing development whether one owns a Roku device or not because it means that any electronic device you own could become essentially worthless overnight if the company that makes it decides to pull this kind of stuff. It would be like if you bought a smart refrigerator and 3 years after you bought it all of a sudden it refused to work anymore and wouldn't keep your food cold unless you agreed with some new terms the refrigerator manufacturer came up with.
It's not so much about the fact that Roku wants arbitration (most companies have that and apparently Roku's had that in their docs for several years already anyway), but that they are forcing you to accept something after the fact after you have purchased and initialized it and then if you don't they can basically make the device worthless... Today it's arbitration. What if tomorrow it's selling every bit of your information? Or perhaps that's what they already are doing or wanting to do anyway and trying to hedge class-action lawsuits like facebook faced a few years ago by this forced ransom?

They apparently recently released the beta of their newest Roku OS 13 to developers. Wonder if this is coincidence? Wonder if they are hiding something? Who knows...What I do know is this is a boneheaded move by a company that has long had pretty good brand loyalty among its customers. Shame on Roku!

 

[dana martin]

no receipt, the damn thing is 9 years old,

 

[chrislong2]

More info: https://community.roku.com/t5/Featu...t-to-coerce-arbitration-agreement/td-p/950649

 

[Malcolm R]

Seems to be SOP for most corporations these days.

 

[chrislong2]

Seems to be SOP for most corporations these days.

I don't think so. Most corps make you agree to terms to use their product, but I personally have never had any physical device that I bought and paid for years later out of the blue refuse to work unless I agreed to whatever brand NEW terms they decided to shove down. Roku turning people's TV's into giant bricks unless they agree to whatever Roku comes up with on any given day isn't cool and the 32+ pages of replies so far on roku's site by people upset with them for that shows that. But I do fear this WILL become par for the course for many more companies if more people don't get up in arms and complain about this type of behavior.