Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

By William Joel , senior creative director for The Verge and Polygon, overseeing art, design, and product development. He has over 15 years of experience in digital media.

On June 6th, my TCL TV’s Roku OS was updated to version 13.0.0. Ever since, on everything I watch, there is motion smoothing — a TV and film purists’ deepest nightmare. There is no way to turn it off.

In the updated OS, Roku added a feature called Roku Smart Picture, which, according to its release notes, “automatically improves picture quality dynamically as users stream.” While Roku doesn’t explicitly mention motion smoothing, or what Roku calls “action smoothing,” the update has made it so that I and many others with Roku TVs see motion smoothing, regardless of whether the picture setting is Roku Smart Picture or not. My TV didn’t even support motion smoothing before this. Now, I can’t make it go away.

If you’re someone who doesn’t notice motion smoothing or doesn’t particularly care about it, imagine if, suddenly, your ebook updated so all the fonts were three times as large. Or if your phone decided all video and audio would be played at 2x. Some folks might prefer that, but it should be a choice. Forcing a device to change how a user experiences content that is different than what is expected, with no means to revert or disable the change, is bad. That should be obvious.

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