The blunder appears to have landed with Roku OS 14.5, which rolled out in late April. The update, which was meant to offer “performance optimisations, bug fixes, and improvements to security, stability” according to Roku, instead left Disney+, Netflix, and Apple TV+ with visibly washed-out HDR visuals. And that's just the start.

Complaints began hitting Roku’s community forum about a week ago. On 1 May, a company representative finally admitted they were “investigating the Disney Plus HDR content that was washed out after the recent update.” But users quickly pointed out it wasn’t just Disney+ affected, with reports coming in about similar issues on Max, Fandango, and  Amazon Prime Video.

“I’m surprised more people aren’t complaining because it makes a ton of shows simply unwatchable. Was looking forward to Andor, and Tuesday night [was] ruined,” posted forum user noob99999, who confirmed the issue spanned “multiple apps”.

While the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple’s app was caught in the mess, users haven’t seen any issues yet with Roku streaming sticks—ironically, one workaround involved plugging a Roku stick into a Roku TV. TCL models dominate the list of casualties, but at least one Hisense and one Sharp set are affected. Roku hasn’t published an official list of bricked TVs, keeping the uncertainty flowing.

Some users, like forum poster Squinky, initially thought Disney+ was the sole culprit, but others quickly disabused them of the notion. Standard tricks like rebooting, resetting to factory settings, or software checks did nothing.

Despite the mounting feedback, Roku is still crowdsourcing the problem. One rep is apparently relying on forum users to “share their experiences” so the company can “dig deeper.” That’s a charming way to say, “we have no idea what’s wrong.”