Roku is stepping into premium TV territory at CES 2024 with its new Pro Series sets, which feature Mini LED backlighting for better brightness and contrast, as well as enhanced audio. The company announced its first self-made TVs at CES last year — a surprising move, since it has also partnered with TCL and others for years to build "Roku TVs" powered by the Roku OS. Roku's first batch of TV sets, the Select and Plus models, were clearly value-oriented, with prices ranging from $149 to $999. The Pro Series — which includes 55-inch, 65-inch and 75-inch models — tops out at $1,500.

Calling these "high-end" TVs is relative, of course. You can easily spend thousands more for QLED sets from Samsung, Sony and LG, and the prices only get higher once you're looking at OLED TVs. Rather than gunning for the top of the heap, Roku still appears to be targeting value-oriented shoppers who would normally consider TCL's cheaper TVs. (Roku told us last year it wasn't planning to compete with partners like TCL, but that seems harder to believe now.)

While Roku's earlier mid-range Plus TVs included some notable features, like QLED displays and support for Dolby Vision and Atmos, the Mini LED backlighting in the Pro Series TVs will be a noticeable upgrade. Most mid-range TVs feature a small amount of local dimming backlight zones, which can increase the brightness and contrast in specific areas of the screen. Mini LED backlights offer higher brightness, and since they're so small, they allow for hundreds (and potentially thousands) of dimming zones.

At this point, Mini LEDs are the closest you'll get to the power of OLEDs — which can turn individual pixels on and off to achieve perfect blacks and extreme levels of contrast — on a standard LED screen.

Roku

On top of a new family of TVs, Roku also announced that it will be tapping into AI and machine learning for its new Roku Smart Picture features, which can automatically adjust Roku TVs for specific types of content. The company says most consumers don't typically adjust their TV settings, which means they're likely stuck viewing content in sub-optimal ways. We won't see Smart Picture in action until Spring 2024, but it could potentially help to tone down motion smoothing during films and bump it up for sports, where you want footage to look more realistic. (And of course, image purists can always turn it off.)

Roku says its new Pro Series TVs will arrive in the US in Spring 2024. The company will also expand retail availability for its Select and Plus series sets, but we don't have specifics on where they'll show up yet.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

Roku TVs will finally live up to their name this year. At CES, the streaming device company announced that it'll be building its own smart TVs for the first time. When the Roku TV program debuted in 2014, it was a way for the company to bring its streaming software into TVs built by partners like TCL and Hisense. But now Roku is debuting it's own family of HD and 4K sets ranging from 24 to 75-inches, which are set to arrive in spring.

Value appears to be the key, as the company says the TVs will range from $119 to $999. That should help Roku's partners to rest easy — we've seen some sets like the TCL Series 8 scale into premium $2,000 territory. The company isn't divulging many technical details around these TVs yet, but don't expect them to have some of the nicer features TCL and others are including, like super bright MiniLED panels. Still, Roku's sets may eat into the lower-end offerings from its partners.

Roku

Chris Larson, Roku's VP of retail strategy, tells Engadget that the company isn't trying to directly compete with existing partners, instead it wants to have a bit more control over how some Roku TVs are produced. For example, Roku is bundling its voice remotes with all of its new sets, even the cheap HD models (Select Series TV's come with the Roku Voice Remote, while Premium Series sets include the rechargeable Voice Remote Pro) . That's something the company couldn't push partners to do, especially when it came to budget TVs.

Down the line, Larson says the new TVs will also bring Roku closer to component suppliers, like the companies behind screen panels and the chips that power smart devices. That could help the company "drive innovation in the TV process." These new Roku TVs will work alongside Roku's existing home wireless speakers and other home theater equipment, just like partner offerings. But the company could potentially cook up some new features that are exclusive to its TVs — or at least, capabilities partners may not want to implement.

Early last year, Netflix started using a new codec called AV1 on a select set of titles on Android. Now, the streaming giant has enabled AV1 streaming on the PS4 Pro and a limited number of smart TV models. Netflix was a key contributor to the development of AV1, which is available for use royalty free under the Alliance of Open Media. It shared this list of supported TVs with The Verge:

• Select Samsung 2020 UHD Smart TVs

• Select Samsung 2020 UHD QLED Smart TVs

• Select Samsung 2020 8K QLED Smart TVs

• Samsung The Frame 2020 Smart TVs

• Samsung The Serif 2020 Smart TVs

• Samsung The Terrace 2020 Smart TVs

• Any TV connected to a PS4 Pro streaming with the Netflix app

• Select Amazon Fire TV devices with Fire OS 7 and above

• Select Android TV devices with Android OS 10 and above

The company explained that deployment on TVs took sometime because playback on TV platforms depend on hardware. It was only over the past year that the industry released models capable of AV1 streaming. Netflix conducted comparison testing before rollout and found that AV1 delivers videos with better quality than other codecs, especially when there's network congestion. It also noticed fewer noticeable drops in quality due to changing network conditions and lesser time to start streams. In addition, since AV1 has higher compression efficiency than the codecs Netflix is currently using, it needs lesser bandwidth. That could lead to longer streaming sessions in 4K resolution. 

A team within the company created a rollout strategy to minimize associated costs with encoding its whole catalogue. Netflix will consider a title's popularity into consideration and start with well-known shows like La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) to make sure the AV1 streaming reaches the most number of viewers. The streaming giant also said that it's working with more manufacturers to develop more devices with AV1 playback capability.