One of my favorite things to do around the holidays is host friends and family at my home for movie nights. And while sometimes we'll pick a film to watch that everyone is familiar with, more often than not, I like to take these impromptu movie nights as an opportunity to share a hidden gem that most of my guests haven't seen.
However, I recently found out that a Roku feature that rolled out way back in 2021 was hampering my ability to start movies I had already watched, limiting my ability to jump in right from the beginning during movie nights. The feature is called Instant Resume and while it can be helpful in plenty of instances, it can also be a bit of a nuisance on shared devices or accounts. And while most features are able to be toggled on or off, this is one option that apparently Roku does not want users to have control over.
What is Roku Instant Resume?
Helping you keep your place when you have other things to do.
Don't get me wrong, Roku's Instant Resume feature is fairly useful if you're the only one using your TV and mainly watch things solo. I recently watched Defunctland's four hour deep-dive on Disney parks' so-called living characters on YouTube, and even though I probably would have enjoyed being able to watch the entire 4-hour video straight through, life got in the way it took me several sessions to actually make it through the entire video. Fortunately, thanks to Roku's Instant Resume feature, my place was held every single time, and I could jump back into the video whenever I wanted to pick up where I left off.
However, when sharing a device (or trying to show a new movie to friends) this feature becomes cumbersome as, depending on what app you're using, you either need to exit out of the video and then find the restart button, or press the rewind button on the Roku remote until you get to the beginning of the video, potentially exposing your guests to spoilers if they look at the TV at the wrong time.
I thought there might have been an easy way to simply turn off this feature, but curiously, no matter how many menus you look through, it simply doesn't appear. However, there is a way to force Roku to forget what you've been watching.
A small workaround
Use the Roku's force close function to get rid of your watching data
Though it's not a perfect workaround, if you know that you don't want to use Roku's Instant Resume feature, you can clear your watch data by force closing whatever app you want the data removed from. In order to do this, instead of pressing the Home button, you will need to press and hold the back button on your Roku remote until the Roku system prompts confirmation to close the app entirely. When you relaunch the app, all of your viewing data and saved spots will be gone, and movie night will be saved!
Note, even though Roku might not save your data, if you are using a logged-in account on an app like YouTube or Netflix, your place still might be saved at the account level, which would supersede the Roku Instant Resume workaround mentioned above.
If you'd like to learn more about this feature, you can check out more on Roku's developer's guide here.