The fourth generation of Roku’s streaming device, the Roku 4, will release before the end of this year. The event is scheduled to take place several months after the release of Apple TV Box featuring great voice-recognition capabilities from the friendly, familiar assistant Siri. Apple users already know thanks to their iPhones and iPads.
The new Apple TV was unveiled by the Cupertino-based tech giant on 9th September and this new updated video streaming box was predicted to become the next big thing among the various streaming devices available today.
A lot of users were convinced that Apple released a worthy competitor for the Roku in the streaming devices market. In fact, market analysts who have long learnt to predict the market are quite sure that the new Apple TV will grab a new share of the market from various other competitors like the Amazon Fire TV, Google Chromecast, but there’s a catch.
It will pose no threat to Roku’s market share. At the same time, Apple has failed to increase excitement among consumers, regarding their latest Apple TV because they are notorious for updating the hardware and speed of the Apple TV, which is not done by other streaming device manufacturers in the market. We wonder whether the latest Apple TV device suffers from the same flaw.
Roku already has a place of its own in the streaming devices market and has a 34% market share in the United States. This clearly indicates that Roku cannot be displaced from the competition by any new product released in the market.
At the same time, Roku’s market share keeps increasing since in the first quarter of this year, it managed to capture 37% of the US households. It is followed by Google Chromecast at 19%, Apple TV at 17% and finally by Amazon Fire TV at 14%.
In the meantime, there are already various signs surfacing the internet, clearly showing that Roku 4 is nearing its release date. This anticipation has sent a lot of people hunting for some leaked photos or images of this device.
People already witnessed what appeared to be the next-generation version of the Roku at the FCC and recently someone also managed to locate the image of Roku 4 on the company’s own website.
Although the link has been pulled out since then, the copy of this image still remains. The device appears to be quite unique as it stays far away from the wider and thinner features found in common products of this category.
AFTV News discovered this image. According a to a post, it detailed how the writer used a script to hunt through the websites, searching for images that are yet to be published but related to certain keywords.
This same script was used to search the official Roku website for hints and traces of the yet-unrevealed Roku 4. One was found and at the time of publication, it was still available on the maker’s website through the link: ‘https: //image.roku.com/ww/images/partials/product-selector/roku-4.png’
If you notice the image, you will see that it shows a largely wide and comparatively flat Roku player shown alongside a common Roku remote. The device has the same black and purple accents and the remote has the same audio port located on the side of the remote.
The dedicated control buttons seem to have been changed with one available for ESPN and YouTube. We still wonder whether this is a real device, but we’ll just have to be patient and wait for now.