I use a PlayStation 4. It has client apps for all the things I want to use. And if you’re a little savvy, it can also be used for watching DRM free content (e.g. streaming from a media server, watching from an inserted USB drive, etc.). It's the laziest option to get most of what I want.

I have a PS4 sitting around collecting dust - I’ll have to give this a try! Thanks for the suggestion

If your TV and remote support HDMI CEC, you can even control the PS4 mostly fine with just the TV remote. Not enough buttons to play games, but for browsing videos, I find it works.

My original inspiration was that I wanted to watch Netflix with a non-crappy remote! Playing the occasional video game was just a bonus :)

A non-crappy remote that has to be constantly plugged in for charging..

Does PS4 support any streaming game services?

PS Now

So, no competitors?

Not familiar with the Roku ecosystem, but is it possible to sideload apps? On Android there are native YouTube player apps like NewPipe (which reverse engineer the APIs and work without any of the consent prompts and nagging UI), and one whose name escapes me, which is a pretty usable client to YouTube, based around the web interface (used sometimes on fire stick etc.)

I guess the underlying issue is the reliance on these large platforms (like YouTube etc), and how they can use access to their walled garden platform as a way to coerce independent commercial negotiations.

Sort of, not suremif it's changed but you used to be able to do this with the developer options and load a single channel with it. You'd have to unload the old one to load a new onw though.

I've never used it but here are some docs

https://developer.roku.com/docs/developer-program/getting-st...

You can side load apps but I don’t think anyone is going to put in the work to keep a YouTube TV app up-to-date for Roku once breaking API changes happen.

If they were able to leverage something existing like NewPipe though (which is tracking the upstream breaking changes regularly and near-realtime), I guess the bar to doing this would be much lower though.

Same! I bought a chrome cast without realizing I couldn’t watch Prime on it, then I learned about the Amazon/Google dispute. I felt so disappointed in these companies.

Amazon has added casting support to the prime video app.

Why did they withhold support in the first place? I had assumed it was because they wanted to sell fire sticks. It's not in Google's interest to make Chromecast less capable.

This was honestly never a big deal for me because I could always cast from my browser on a laptop. But, yeah, I've observed that some of the Apple/Google/Amazon incompatibilities seem to have gone away over time.

I believe Google didn't permit FireTV to carry YoutubeTV because Amazon wouldn't sell Google Chromecast in their store (because it competed w/FireTV I guess).