Roku Premiere review: The cheapest route to 4K HDR TV

You can probably see the thought process taking place around a table at Roku HQ: what would you get if you take the Roku Express - the company's cheapest device - and combine it with the Streaming Stick+?

The answer is the Roku Premiere, a device that has a small receiver box like the Express, but offers the same quality as the Streaming Stick+. It neatly slots between the two in terms of price, making it one of the cheapest streaming devices that will give you access to 4K HDR (that's Ultra-HD high dynamic range) content.

If your TV doesn't support the streaming service you want - like the new Apple TV+ offering - then getting a device like the Roku Premiere might be your best bet to open that door.

Design and setup 

• Dimensions 35.56 x 83.82 x 17.78mm / Weight: 37g
• HDMI 2.0a connection
• Micro-USB for power

The Roku Premiere is a compact set-top box. It's so small that the folds in the accompanying HDMI cable mean that it struggles to sit flat - it's just not heavy enough to flatten the cable, that's how small it is.

Being diminutive has its advantages, because it doesn't take up much space. The remote works via IR (infrared), however, so you need to be able to see the front of it, for line-of-sight operation, and it comes with an accompanying piece of double-sided tape with the idea being that you could stick it to the side or bottom of your TV.

Certainly, you can't have it far from your TV if you plan to use the accompanying HDMI cable, because it's not very long. If you're connecting to your TV you'll then have to make sure you have a long enough Micro-USB cable to power the Roku too - so there are some set-up considerations. It feels as though the best option would be to connect directly to an AV receiver, but we don't all have that luxury. 

Once this small box is connected, there's very little to do in terms of setup - you really just have to connect it to your Wi-Fi network before you then have to sign into the services that you subscribe to or have access to. The Roku Premiere will test your display and automatically adjust your output settings, the only other thing you might have to do is adjust the settings on your HDMI input on your TV.

The connection and setup is essentially the same as the Roku Express, while the interface is the same across all the Roku devices, which makes using it nice and easy.

Roku OS and supported services 

• Easy-to-navigate menu
• All UK catch-up services
• Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV app 

The Roku interface uses big, bold icons for the different services that it offers, with the remote letting you quickly jump through and select what you want to watch. It's great that it's not over-complicated and it's not always trying to offer you content that you don't want to watch - it's a lot more direct and to the point.

Having a proper user interface (UI) gives the Roku an advantage over the likes of Chromecast, but it's a similar position to Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K in that it's fairly easy to get to what you want to watch. The remote has a couple of buttons to take you directly to services and predictably these are the most common services that you might want to use: Netflix, Spotify, and so on.

In most cases you'll have to sign into the services that you want to use - and for most that means you'll get resume play from other devices. For example, Netflix knows where you are and what you have watched, so when you open up the service on your Roku, the same applies. That's now true of UK catch-up services like BBC iPlayer - meaning it's a lot smoother to catch-up on your favourite British series.

There is a wide range of content available and one of the new and attractive additions is the Apple TV app. This means you can access anything you might have once purchased through iTunes, making it really easy to watch this content on your TV. It's not as fully-featured as Apple TV 4K - you can't access your photos or AirPlay things to your TV - but in terms of content delivery it does the essentials.

The same applies for Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Now TV (for Sky content), Hulu, Starz, Showtime, HBO Now and plenty more. Although not there at its inception, Roku also now offers Disney+ access too.

One of the big strengths of the platform is the universal searching that it offers - it will search for TV or movies across those services, so you can see whether you'll be able to get it from an existing subscription or how much it might cost you.

One of the things we like about Roku is how solid the platform is. It doesn't freeze or falter, it seems to be able to serve up your content with very little fuss. 

Performance and supported quality

• 4K HDR
• Dolby Atmos 

The Roku Premiere supports a wide range of the latest standards for TV delivery. On the vision front it will give you up to 4K (3840 x 2160p) at 60 frames per second (if needed), while it also supports HDR10. This means that it gets the 4K HDR label to cater for high dynamic range content - but it doesn't offer the most comprehensive supports in that regard.

Missing from the list is the dynamic HDR10+ standard that's appearing in some quarters, although we've not actually seen any streaming content in this format. Rakuten TV will be supporting it, but we're probably a few years away from that really being a problem. The other big standard that's not supported is Dolby Vision. 

Dolby Vision is, like HDR10+, a dynamic standard designed to give you a better experience than the basic HDR10. It's supported by Netflix and Amazon Video, as well as Apple TV. Of course, you'd need to have a TV with a Dolby Vision-capable panel if you wanted to benefit from that - in which case you'd be better off with the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K.

The lack of these two dynamic HDR formats on a streamer at this price isn't a huge deal in our opinion. While they are notionally better than normal HDR, you do at least have some support. In the main, though, it's the 4K resolution and additional colour potential from HDR that really shines.

In terms of performance, this will depend very much on your Wi-Fi network. We've found the Roku Premiere to quickly move through the bitrates to offer top quality quickly. That depends on the source - as in some cases you can't immediately identify what quality you're watching, as there's no universal set of stats that you can access on the Roku platform.

In all cases you'll need a TV that supports these formats too. There's no harm in connecting the Roku Premiere to your 1080p SDR TV, because it will still look great - you just won't be getting the 4K HDR out of it. 

On the audio front, there's support for DTS Digital Surround and Dolby Atmos, although these are via passthrough so you'll need something to decode that. If you happen to have an Atmos-enabled AV receiver then great, you'll benefit from great audio when streaming supported content. 

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