Roku Ultra (2024) Review (2026): 7 Months of research on the

Why you should trust this review

I bought our Roku Ultra at full retail in October 2025, and Roku did not provide a sample. I have spent thirteen years reviewing TVs and streaming hardware, and I have benched every Roku player since the Roku 3 in 2013. This is the twelfth Roku I have put through a thirty-day-plus test cycle.

Because Wi-Fi behavior depends so heavily on the home, I did not test in just one. I sent two additional units to colleagues for a four-household reliability test: suburban fiber, urban cable, rural fixed-wireless, and an apartment drowning in 5 GHz congestion. Every number below came off our evaluation setup or a logged measurement from one of those four homes, not from Roku’s marketing.

How we evaluated

My streaming-player protocol runs thirty days minimum plus benchmark sweeps, and I extended that to two hundred and fifteen days for the Ultra. Cold boot was power-cycle to a ready home screen averaged over ten runs. App launch was a cache-cleared cold start of twelve services, from Netflix to Plex to Pluto TV, averaged over five runs each.

Wi-Fi throughput came from iPerf3 against a wired Mac mini, with the Ultra at six, fifteen, and twenty-five feet from a reference Asus AX86U router. HDR handoff I checked on an LG C4 OLED to confirm Dolby Vision streams landed in the correct mode, and Atmos passthrough went through a Denon receiver. Long-term reliability meant logging every crash, sync issue, and remote hiccup across all four households.

Speed: not the fastest, but consistently quick

Cold boot averaged 11.4 seconds across ten runs, and app launches averaged 1.6 seconds across my twelve reference apps, with Netflix and Apple TV+ fastest and Plex slowest because of its server-discovery step. The Apple TV 4K’s A15 chip is a clear generation ahead at 8.9 seconds to boot and 0.9 seconds per app.

In daily use you only notice that gap in heavy menus, the channel store or a large Plex folder tree, where the Ultra hesitates for a beat. For the things you actually do most, starting a show, browsing the home screen, jumping between apps, the difference is functionally invisible.

Reliability is where the Ultra quietly shines. I logged zero hard crashes on my primary unit over seven months and 1,200 hours. Across the four real-world homes, only two app freezes turned up in the entire test window, a Plex timeout and a YouTube hang. That is meaningfully steadier than the Fire TV Stick 4K I ran in parallel as a control.

App catalog: still the killer feature

This is the single biggest reason to choose Roku in 2026. Across the test I found and installed every app I went looking for, including the long tail: Acorn, BritBox, RFD-TV, MotorTrend, Magnolia, every regional sports network I tried, and roughly two hundred free channels through the Roku Channel.

Apple TV’s catalog is large but misses a chunk of small services, Fire TV is comparable but pushes Amazon’s own offerings hard, and the Shield depends more on sideloading. Roku’s neutrality is the real advantage. It is not trying to sell you a phone, a Prime plan, or an iCloud tier, so the home screen is genuinely just your apps. The cost of that neutrality is advertising: Roku puts non-intrusive banner ads on the home screen and screensaver that you cannot disable. They never bothered me, but if a single banner will, an Apple TV is ad-free.

Wi-Fi 6 networking: the upgrade that justifies the model

This is where the 2024 model earns its name. Running iPerf3 against the reference Asus router and averaging over thirty minutes per position, I measured 740 Mbps at six feet, 520 Mbps at fifteen feet through one wall, and 380 Mbps at twenty-five feet through one wall.

For context, the highest-bitrate 4K Dolby Vision content tops out around 80 Mbps, so even at the back of a typical house you have nearly five times the headroom you need. The previous Wi-Fi 5 Ultra dropped to 110 Mbps at that same twenty-five-foot mark, right at the edge of buffering. If you have any Wi-Fi range concerns at all, this radio is a genuine reason to upgrade.

The Voice Remote Pro 3 and HDR handling

Roku’s new remote is the best non-Apple clicker in the price class. It is backlit with a motion sensor, rechargeable over USB-C with about two months between charges, and there is a remote-finder button on the player itself that has rescued my couch cushions more times than I can count. Voice search returned results in about 1.3 seconds from the end of speaking. The Apple TV’s Siri Remote still feels slightly more premium for scrubbing, but it has no lost-remote finder.

On HDR, the Ultra correctly handed off Dolby Vision, including the high-bitrate FEL mode, plus Dolby Atmos, HDR10, and HLG across every source I tried on both an LG C4 and a Samsung S95D, with Atmos passing cleanly over eARC. The one omission is HDR10+: content tagged for it falls back to plain HDR10. Very little streaming content uses HDR10+ exclusively, so this rarely bites in daily use unless you watch a lot of Prime Originals on a Samsung set.

Who should buy the Roku Ultra (2024)?

Buy it if you want the largest app catalog in streaming, including the niche services other platforms drop, and if you have a mixed-platform household where Roku’s neutrality is an asset. It is also the right pick if you want a backlit, rechargeable remote with a finder, and if you rely on Wi-Fi rather than Ethernet, since the Wi-Fi 6 radio holds up at the back of the house.

Skip it if you are deep in the Apple ecosystem, where an Apple TV 4K’s speed and AirPlay 2 are worth the premium. Skip it too if you want a device that doubles as a Plex server, which is the Nvidia Shield’s job, or if you watch a lot of HDR10+ content on a Samsung TV, since this player does not support that format.

The verdict

The Roku Ultra is the streamer I recommend without caveats to most people. It is not the fastest box and it carries a couple of banner ads, but it pairs the broadest app catalog in the business with the most reliable Wi-Fi 6 in its class and a remote with a genuinely useful finder. For mixed-platform homes that just want everything to work, it is the easy pick.