Proposed class action accuses Roku of bricking users' TVs with bad updates

A couple of major TV brands are now at the center of a class-action lawsuit.

A plaintiff named Terri Else proposed a class-action suit in California against TCL and Roku, per CNET. The specific accusation here is that Roku and TCL push software updates to their TVs that make the devices defective without any kind of a fix.

Roku has denied the claims in Else's complaint.

While Roku is primarily known as a manufacturer of streaming devices, it does manufacture its own TVs under the Roku Select and Roku Plus names, while also providing the underlying smart TV operating system for several models of TCL TVs. This lawsuit calls out Roku Select, Roku Plus, and any TCL TV in the 3, 4, 5, or 6 series running Roku OS.

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Else accused TCL of selling her a TV that became defective a few years after purchase in 2018, before it eventually stopped working entirely in 2023. According to Else, TCL would not cover whatever was happening to the TV under its warranty. What's worse, Else says, is that the next TV she bought also allegedly stopped working within a year.

The complaint claims that "Roku's software updates are repetitively defective, materially impairing the functionality of Roku Products, rendering many consumers' televisions either entirely unusable ("bricked"), blacked out, or otherwise substantially degraded in terms of device performance." The complaint specifically accuses Roku software updates of causing "screen black outs, loss of video, [and] the screen flashing on and off," among other problems.

Roku is a very popular brand in the U.S., and you don't have to look far on places like Reddit to find complaints about TVs from either Roku or TCL being bricked after software updates.

That said, a Roku spokesperson said to CNET that these claims are "meritless." Given that this is still just a proposed class-action lawsuit, there's still a chance that this complaint doesn't go anywhere.