Ideas for Roku player

[patrick0280]

As someone who came over from MOG (RIP), I find the Spotify program on Roku to be not user friendly at all. In short it needs a complete makeover. More often than not I find myself connecting my phone to my speaker system to use it through the app instead of going through Roku, which completely defeats the purpose. My purpose for this post isn't to whine and complain about how Spotify isn't MOG, but rather to offer some ideas they can use that MOG had to try to make it better.

First, the What's New section needs better organization and updates. There's no reason why they can't have a grid system like the web player organized by date to better find new releases. And what’s up with all the classical listings??

As far as the search function goes, rather than put in a search term in the main box, then have to use the arrow to go right into the Tracks > Albums > Artists boxes, there should be a separate search for each one.

One of the simplest features I miss most from MOG is being able to search by artist and either shuffling their entire catalog, or playing a radio mix based on the artist, neither of which the Roku program can do. I guess what I’m looking for here is more integration with the web player, as far as functionality goes.

Lastly it would be nice to be able to make a favorite artist list. Just like you can add songs to playlists, why not have an option to create a list for your favorite artists for easy access?

I’m sure there’s more, but these are the features I’d like to see most in the Roku app. I welcome any feedback by anyone in case I missed something.  Or maybe someone from Spotify can reply. Is the Roku not popular enough to bother with updates?  I see you don't even have a label to attach to the post for Roku.   Thanks!

[RobAtSGH]

I heartily agree. The Roku client 1.0 is sorely lacking in things that make it useful. And the search function is abysmal. The search-ahead hinting falls apart completely with any multi-word artist or title, so you have to input the whole name in order to return any results.

* Saved album support - I can access these on every other mobile/web platform, but need to make them a playlist for the Roku client. Why?

* Genre browse - searching on set-top boxes sucks. And yet, the plentiful screen real estate for a browse grid goes unused.

* Seamless mobile/set-top integration - the YouTubers have figured this out. Why can't I use my mobile interface to throw a playlist to the Roku client? Let me pair the two.

* Radio channels - not a big deal for me, personally, since I tend to use Pandora a lot more for this. But, it does seem to be a pretty big feature gap when a large number of your subscribers use it on other devices.

I get the feeling that what we got was the Minimum Viable Product, and no one's prioritized any feature updates since.