3 Steps to Achieve Roku Home Screen Zen

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3 Steps to Achieve Roku Home Screen Zen
Video Duration 00:09:05
Description: - Hello everybody, and welcome to Roku Zen. Today, we're gonna talk about your home screen, how to get it just the way you want, including how to strip away some of the things that might be distracting, less used, getting in your way of an easy, painless Roku experience. So, hang with me. I'm gonna show you a few tips and tricks that you can use for your own Roku Zen experience. Let's dive in. All right, thanks for joining me today, everybody. If you enjoy this video, if it's fun for you, go ahead and give it a like. Yeah, don't forget to do that on your way out of this video. Okay, so let's dive in. Roku Zen, I do feel like I'm qualified now To talk about this, 'cause I got the man bun and everything. So I've been preparing for this video for two years. That's what I'm saying. It wasn't the pandemic, it was this video that gave me my long hair. When you log into your Roku, it probably looks something like this. So we've got our menu on the left, we've got our apps over here, there's an ad on the right. Okay, there's nothing we can do about the ad, but we are gonna talk about the apps. We're gonna talk about this left-hand menu column here. We're also gonna talk about the appearance of your Roku, trying to get it set up just the way you want it. First of all, let's get to the Zen stuff. Now, what I mean by that is that your Roku does have a lot of options. There's a lot going on here on the left-hand side. If you use all of that, great. But, if you don't, you may not know that you can get rid of a lot of that stuff. So, if I click the up button once, it takes me to Settings. I go over and I come down here to the Home screen. If I go to Home screen, you can see that there are a few things here listed with show or hide. Right now, they're all listed with the show, but I can come over here. And one by one, go through, Hide each and every one of these. We'll talk about the merits of this in a moment. And then this last one is a little different. Shortcuts, you'll see Add Channels and TV Off. I'll show you what those are. Those are a little bit different. But I come back to the Home screen. Oh my gosh, look at that. That is much easier to look at now. On the left-hand side, we only have five options. These ones, you can't remove. But, for the most part, you probably don't feel like you need to. You got Home, you've got Search, that's gonna be obviously useful. Streaming Channels is where you can go find more apps and channels. Obviously useful. My Feed, I kind of wish they would let me take this off, but I guess I understand why they don't. And Settings, obviously, we do need our settings. If I click over to the right, You'll see right above my first row of apps, there's Add Channels and TV Off. You may want to leave those there. If you have an older Roku device that doesn't have TV controls on the remote, maybe a cheaper Roku device that doesn't come with that fancy-schmancy remote with the TV controls. That's totally fine. If you have a Roku TV, this will look a little bit different because TV is Off, well, you only have one remote, right? It's working for the built-in Roku and the TV itself. So you don't have to worry about that. Now, the Add Channels, wait a minute. We have that right here. Yeah, it's the exact same thing, but they do give you a shortcut for that. So if you find yourself in a position where you don't really need those, so for instance, I'm using my Roku Ultra, it's got the TV controls built right in, And so I don't need the TV Off button. These are both extraneous to me. So I go to the same place that we did before in Settings, go to Home screen, Shortcuts, and take both of those off, hit my Home button again, and voila! They are gone. So now, we are in a situation where, yeah, things are a lot neater, a lot cleaner than they were before without so many tiles and so many distractions over on the left-hand side. Now, what were those options? Let's actually take a moment and go take a look at those. If we go back there, Featured Free. So this is free content that they're going to recommend for you. So if you like that, you can bring that back in. Live TV, again, same thing. They have a live TV hub that you can go into through that shortcut. I'm not much of a live TV guy, so I don't use this very often. If I ever do, I can turn it back on, but I prefer to hide it myself. Movie and TV Store is exactly that. Instead of featured free content, this is featured paid content. And so if you've ever used something like Amazon Prime or, yeah, Prime Video as a rental service, even if you're not subscribed to it, you can still rent and buy movies and it shows up in a movie library. They do that here on Roku as well. So anytime you rent or buy something, you can find it there. My Offers is a great one to turn on if you are ready to upgrade your device or if you need a fresh remote, or something like that. So you can actually turn on My Offers in that case. I would usually leave it off otherwise. And then let's take a look at that one first. So you go to My Offers. Oh, great, I can get some headphones for 15 bucks, and a new remote for 15 bucks. These offers are here for you depending on what devices you have. So I have a lot of Roku devices just by the nature of this channel, so I get a lot of offers here. But going back to our Home page, again, this is about Zen, right? We're trying to Zen out here. So I'm gonna go back to my Home screen And turn all of those off. Ah, there we go. Looks great. There's something else I can do with the appearance. If I go into my Settings again and go to the Theme, I can change the theme on my Roku. If you're a brand-new Roku user, this might be new to you. If you're an experienced Roku user, Yeah, this is probably pretty familiar, but Roku does have themes, and those themes are going to change the appearance: the background, the sounds when you click through on your menus, that sort of thing. So right now, you can see it's set to the Roku default. I do have the Roku Photo Streams for my screensaver. I talked about that in last week's live stream. So if you're not watching the live streams, you really should be. All right, so if I come in here to the Theme packs, you can see here are some kinds of regular ones, The ones that they offer to everybody right upfront. But if I go over here, I can search for more wallpapers, more screensavers, and find lots of different packs or lots of different theme packs that way. So, what's the point of this? The point of this is if it's gonna be about Roku Zen, When you log into your Roku, you want it to feel welcoming, you want it to feel like it's your own, right? So if you like the super simple default, just kind of nice gradient purple that they have on there, great, leave it as is. If you prefer something... Well, in this case, baseball, man, I love baseball. Okay, so we're gonna set that as my wallpaper. It won't change the sounds. Okay, so this one gives me the same sounds, but if I chose something like Western, then every time I hit my arrow keys in the menu, It would have a little spurred jingling instead of a click, that sort of thing. Kind of fun. You can decide if that's Zen for you or not. I've tried it a few times, but yeah, you can play around with these and see which one you like the best. And lastly, the next thing you should do is come over here and rearrange your apps. Again, this is something that experienced Roku users probably already know about, but here's a nice reminder for you even so, a reminder that you can press on the star key here and move an app. Okay, so I wanna move that channel somewhere, and you can move it anywhere you like within this tile setup. So what I like to do is make sure that my top six most used apps are right here on the first two rows, so that they're extremely easy to get to. And it roughly goes in order after that. The things I use somewhat often and then the things I barely use kind of end up at the bottom. So I have to scroll past all this stuff to get there. You can choose how you want to arrange it. I know that there are some folks out there who will kind of put their top three apps here, maybe their top six apps, and then put their next most used apps down at the bottom because then you can just press up and there you are at the bottom of your list. So yeah, if you have 100 apps on here, if you have 200 apps on your Roku, it's always a good idea. First of all, it's a good idea to go through and clean out some of the ones you don't use anymore. I have done spring cleaning videos on this channel, So go check those out. But otherwise, make sure that they are arranged in a pleasing order for you. And there you have it, plain and simple. Pretty easy, right? You can achieve Roku Zen just by doing a few things. So let me know how you set up your Zen Roku experience In the comments below and on your way down there. Again, don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoy this video. We do all sorts of stuff like this on this channel. Love having you here. Thanks for watching, everybody, and I'll see you on Fridays At 2:00 PM right here for the live streams. Thanks for watching.
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3 Steps to Achieve Roku Home Screen Zen