Roku “More Ways to Watch” Brings Netflix to Cable (Sort Of) Michael Kwan April 11, 2017 News So, you collapse into the couch after a long day at work. You pick up the TV remote and proceed to do some channel surfing. You stumble across one of your favorite episodes of Friends, but it’s almost finished. With traditional cable TV, you’re probably out of luck. With the new “More Ways to Watch” software update from Roku, you could be in luck. And in for an extended Friends binge-watching marathon well into the night. Roku announced the update on the company blog. As part of Roku OS 7.6, they’re introducing a feature called More Ways to Watch. Leveraging Automatic Content Recognition technology, your Roku will detect what you’re watching on cable or satellite. Then, it will see if the same program is available through other sources. Namely, it will see if any of the “additional viewing options” have this same show (or movie) available. It’ll look through such services as Hulu, Amazon Video and Netflix. If it’s there, it’ll tell you. And you can then watch Ross make a fool of himself for your amusement, right from the beginning of that very same episode. To enable More Ways to Watch, you’ll need to opt in and you can turn it off at any time through the settings menu. They indicate that Roku OS 7.6 will roll out whether you have an integrated Roku TV or you have a little Roku set top box, so long as it’s newer than May 2011. That’s the good news. The bad news is that More Ways to Watch is being restricted to the U.S. only. And they’re also only indicating that More Ways to Watch will come to 4K Roku TV models this summer with no mention of non-4K TVs or STBs. Other new features of Roku OS 7.6 include an update to how live TV pause works, the ability to create a favorite channels list in the Roku TV timer, the option to enter custom names for input sources, and a faster resume time from standby on select models. Share This With The World!
