Any chance you could recommend someone to finally get us different logins for the different profiles? It's kind of ridiculous to have parental controls when they can just change the profile to watch whatever they want. I also don't really like sharing a main account password with kids.
Amazon's video streaming apps are pretty bad across most platforms, iOS excluded. It's extremely slow on the Xbox One and their search for some reason is absolutely awful.
I don't think Roku apps are written in JavaScript/HTML. I believe they use BrightScript (at least on the older models), so I don't think React would help.
It is possible to work directly with C++ though, which I think Netflix must be doing with their Gibbon framework because their interface is very different from those obviously using the Roku tools (and looks exactly like their interface everywhere else). As the article states, Netflix aren't necessarily working with HTML when they make these React views - it sounds very much like how React Native works.
Do you have a cite for that? If there is a c++ sdk it isn't easy to find, though I can easily believe that companies on the scale of Netflix have access to better tools.
Similar problem with their not so new ps4 app. I think it is less the rendering, but the fact that it doesn't prefetch anything ever? Either way it is painful to drill into a particular show from the top level.