Why has Roku decided to remove this functionality? My ISP is charging huge overage fees and you guys ditch the one thing that could help with this. Is Roku secretly making money off of all the data overage fees? I wouldn't be surprised. I have used Roku for several years now but this is it. With the overage fees growing and growing and no way to reduce the bandwidth I'm forced to abandon this platform altogether. It is no longer cheaper than cable and the hit and miss streaming quality is a joke.

So long Roku.

You realize that functionality has not worked in a while (it was a placebo). They just removed it because of that fact. It was designed as a developer tool, which is no longer needed with the new Roku code. If people wanted to test lower-end streams via their channel to make sure it's working, that allowed for it. It was always discouraged not to use the secret screens because they could be removed at any moment. All the new channels using the code and adaptive streams (Netflix has never worked since Roku 2 HD/XD/XS came out) did not honor the bitrate stream change.

Sirgoodframes wrote:

Why has Roku decided to remove this functionality? My ISP is charging huge overage fees and you guys ditch the one thing that could help with this. Is Roku secretly making money off of all the data overage fees? I wouldn't be surprised. I have used Roku for several years now but this is it. With the overage fees growing and growing and no way to reduce the bandwidth I'm forced to abandon this platform altogether. It is no longer cheaper than cable and the hit and miss streaming quality is a joke.

So long Roku.

There's actually a couple things that can help with this.  I'd check your router for QOS settings and bandwidth limiting.  That would achieve the same goal except on a more consistent basis.

The FIRST thing to do - if you haven't already...
Research a new ISP - without a Data Cap.

Trying to manage a Data Cap with a device designed to use Internet Data is... foolish.

Sirgoodframes wrote:

Why has Roku decided to remove this functionality? My ISP is charging huge overage fees and you guys ditch the one thing that could help with this. Is Roku secretly making money off of all the data overage fees? I wouldn't be surprised. I have used Roku for several years now but this is it. With the overage fees growing and growing and no way to reduce the bandwidth I'm forced to abandon this platform altogether. It is no longer cheaper than cable and the hit and miss streaming quality is a joke.

So long Roku.

Another tip to reduce bandwidth. Login to the services, see if they have bandwidth reduction built into their service. I know Netflix and Hulu do. You can set them to a lower bandwidth overall to all your devices, this would help with any device you would own including smartphones and tablets. You can also reduce the Screen Resolution to 720p on the Roku, this will force the 720p streams for services. If you are streaming at 1080p or 4k by default, this would eliminate that problem. There's other methods to fix this issue, just got to explore them. The bitrate screen actually was not one of them and wasn't for a long time.

I know rural areas have limited options and usually they have data usage caps. Plus smaller towns usually have one big DSL or Cable provider and no one else. Alternative ISP might not be an option, but if it is, definitely take it. I would never get AT&T nor Comcast for that reason, and thank goodness I have another option in my town.