Roku Streaming Stick 4K Review: Still Sold, Now 79.99 Dollars

Roku did not discontinue the Streaming Stick 4K. It kept it, raised it from 49.99 to 79.99 dollars in July 2026, and left Dolby Vision out of the newer stick above it.

Reports of this stick’s retirement are wrong, and so is the price most people remember. The Roku Streaming Stick 4K, model 3820R, came through the May 2025 lineup overhaul that killed the old Streaming Stick Plus and saw Roku quietly retire the Express and Express 4K Plus boxes. Its product page was still being served on 1 September 2026. What changed is the number attached to it: in late July 2026 Roku moved it from 49.99 dollars to 79.99, a 60 percent jump and the steepest in the entire player line.

Key facts

• Model 3820R, still on sale alongside the two 2025 sticks
• List price went from 49.99 to 79.99 dollars in July 2026, up 60 percent
• The only Roku stick under 100 dollars that supports Dolby Vision
• Roku Streaming Stick Plus at 59.99 dollars handles HDR10, HDR10 Plus and HLG, but not Dolby Vision
• Roku Ultra rose in the same round, from 99.99 to 149.99 dollars

From 49.99 to 79.99 dollars in one July

Roku lifted prices across every player it sells in July 2026, with coverage appearing on 24 and 25 July. The increases were not uniform, and the oldest 4K stick took the worst of them:

• Roku Streaming Stick: 29.99 to 39.99 dollars, up 33 percent
• Roku Streaming Stick Plus: 39.99 to 59.99 dollars, up 50 percent
• Roku Streaming Stick 4K: 49.99 to 79.99 dollars, up 60 percent
• Roku Ultra: 99.99 to 149.99 dollars, up 50 percent
• Roku Streambar SE: 99.99 to 149.99 dollars, up 50 percent

The newer stick is the one without Dolby Vision

A Roku executive, speaking on background, put the increases down to shortages in computer memory and other components caused by the artificial intelligence rush, as memory manufacturers redirected capacity toward higher-margin chips for AI data centres. That explanation is checkable against a real market, which is more than several rivals offered this year. It also has a wrinkle worth noticing: this is the platform whose leadership has argued publicly that its operating system needs far less memory than the competition, and it still had to move prices by half.

Roku’s May 2025 refresh introduced two sticks, the Streaming Stick (model 3840R) and the Streaming Stick Plus (model 3830R), both drawing power over USB-C from the television’s own port, with the Plus pulling around 2.5 W while streaming 4K. Roku’s product page for the Plus lists HDR10, HDR10 Plus and HLG support – and no Dolby Vision. That format stays exclusive to the older Streaming Stick 4K and to the Roku Ultra.

The result is an upgrade path that runs backwards. The newer, cheaper 4K stick at 59.99 dollars gives up a format that the older, dearer one at 79.99 keeps. Which of those is the right purchase is decided entirely by the television: on a set without Dolby Vision, the Plus is the better buy and saves 20 dollars. On a Dolby Vision panel, the 20 dollars buys the format back, and the alternative inside Roku’s own range is a 149.99-dollar Ultra.

What Roku has added to the home screen since you bought it

On Roku’s April 2024 earnings call, chief executive Anthony Wood confirmed that video advertising was coming to the home screen, converting the static Marquee unit into a video placement. His words were that Roku would add video to that ad, and that it would be the first video ad added to the home screen. By March 2025 the company was testing something further: an auto-playing, manually dismissable full-screen video advert – a Moana 2 trailer – that ran before users could reach the home screen at all. Roku described the test as the latest example of exploring new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.

Jared Newman, writing in PCWorld, judged that Roku had crossed a line by putting an ad wall in front of its home screen, called the experiment a disappointing sign of what is to come, described it as a failure of imagination and ham-fisted, and connected it to the company’s pressure to reach profitability by 2026. The detail that should shape a purchase is the delivery mechanism. None of this was sold to anyone; it arrived by software update on hardware already paid for. A Roku bought in 2022 carries a heavier advertising load in 2026 than it did on the day it came out of the box, and nothing its owner did caused that.

Forced arbitration in 2024, and 576,000 stuffed accounts

In early March 2024 Roku pushed new Dispute Resolution Terms and made televisions and streaming devices unusable until the owner tapped agree. There was no path to keep using hardware you owned without accepting. The new section added a mandatory informal step – complaints routed to Roku’s legal team first, with a required meet-and-confer call before any arbitration – a structure widely read as blunting mass arbitration. Opting out meant posting a physical letter to Roku’s General Counsel at the company’s San Jose headquarters, including name, contact details, registered email, product model and software version, within 30 days of the terms landing on that device. TechCrunch documented the whole sequence as it happened.

The same year brought two credential-stuffing incidents, one affecting around 15,000 accounts and a second affecting around 576,000, disclosed on 12 April 2024. Precision matters here, because this is routinely described wrongly. Attackers used logins leaked from other companies’ breaches; Roku said there was no indication it was the source of the credentials, that sensitive information and full card numbers were not reached, and that fewer than 400 accounts saw unauthorised purchases, all of which were refunded. Roku reset the affected passwords and switched on two-factor authentication across every Roku account. That response was proportionate and, if anything, better than the industry norm.

So the buying question comes down to this. At 79.99 dollars the Streaming Stick 4K is worth it only for a Dolby Vision television in a household already committed to the Roku platform, and even then it is worth watching for retailers still moving pre-increase stock. For everyone else the Plus at 59.99 does the same job minus one format. And whichever one goes in the HDMI port, the thing being bought is a device whose advertising can be increased and whose terms can be rewritten after the money has changed hands, with the hardware held hostage until the new terms are accepted. That happened once already.

Sources: ecoustics · Roku · PCWorld · TechCrunch · CNN