Because VP9 is much, much cheaper for:

- Google, who doesn't have to pay royalties

- Google and consumers, who can enjoy better compression and lower bandwidth

- Consumers, who can enjoy a much more mainstream video encoding format in not just YT but pretty much every app.

Google doesn't want to write off 45% of the set-top market right away, but at the same time it's 100% in the right to demand Roku support modern royalty-free codecs going forward.

Roku fights pretty much everybody nowadays and as someone who's been dealing with full-screen ads and missing apps on my $1000 TV, I have no sympathy for Roku whining about needing to support a modern codec.

That doesn't answer my question though. If they offer non-VP9 YouTube to some, they must offer it to all.

A goat farmer in rural Afghanistan browsing YouTube on his 2003 XP box has a legitimate excuse - Roku does not, especially going forward.

There is a balance between keeping the burden of backwards compatibility forever and making efforts to keep things accessible to those without new hardware.

Google has invested a decent amount of money in developing its Roku app. Roku is now trying to hold users hostage so that Google continues to pour resources into supporting inferior technologies.

We will see how this ends - I think if Google blocked YT/YT TV on Roku, it would annihilate Roku and barely scratch Google.

Also if the answer is try using another Google product(chromecast) to get a good experience that kind of validates Roku's complaint.