It’s prime time for $70 media streamers that offer 4K HDR video and Dolby Atmos audio support: the new Roku Streaming Stick Plus sits alongside the familiar Chromecast Ultra and the new Amazon Fire TV, which I just reviewed last week.

Roku has long been the leader in the streaming box market, mostly because it’s been relatively cheap and aggressively neutral: it supports virtually every streaming service you can think of, save Apple’s iTunes. Roku’s search interface shows you movie listings across all those services with prices clearly displayed so you can cross-shop, and it’s rare for any new service to launch without Roku support, given the ubiquity of the devices.

The new Streaming Stick Plus seems like the culmination of everything Roku’s been building toward: a tiny device that can plug into any TV setup, completely replace the interface and controls with a single remote, and provide access to a huge catalog of content across a range of services. This is the new default Roku — and by extension, the new default choice for people buying a media streamer for now-common 4K TVs. In most situations, it’ll be fine, but if you’re thinking of upgrading just to watch 4K HDR movies, or you’re trying to get the most out of your home theater, you’ll quickly run into some pretty serious limitations.

At a glance, there’s not much new about the Streaming Stick Plus: it’s basically a repackaging of the older Premiere Plus box into a much smaller stick design. The stick design was revolutionary once: the first Roku Streaming Stick and the original Google Chromecast reset a lot of assumptions about what a media streamer should look like. But there’s a reason Google and Amazon quickly moved on to hanging dongle designs: sticks are extremely unwieldy, and the Streaming Stick Plus might be the most unwieldy stick ever.

The Streaming Stick Plus is longer than a Chromecast or other stick, and might need an extender to fit properly

The Streaming Stick Plus isn’t huge, but at 3.7 inches it’s pretty long. If your TV’s HDMI ports are on the back or you have a receiver, you’ll need to have enough space to accommodate it, or buy an HDMI extender to make it work. There’s a single white power LED that flickers when the stick gets a command from the remote, which is nice.

Almost every media streamer is bedeviled by Wi-Fi performance issues, as they’re often located in corners of rooms, in cabinets, or stuck behind TV screens. Roku’s solution with the Streaming Stick Plus is quite clever: the Wi-Fi antenna is actually part of the power cable, hidden in a little black box along the way. That means the power cable is somewhat proprietary — Roku actually used the older Mini USB connector to prevent confusion — but you’re supposed to plug this thing in and forget about it, so it’s not a big deal.

Unfortunately, this clever solution is pretty clumsy in practice, because the antenna cable is really short, and Roku ships a USB extension cable in the box to make it all work. So the complete setup is a USB power brick, a USB extension cable, the antenna cable, and the Streaming Stick Plus itself. It’s basically a long wire with a bunch of big bumps on it, and it’s anything but attractive. It’s all supposed to be hidden behind your TV, but if you’ve got any sort of cable management going on you’ll definitely have to take it all into account. I don’t have any Wi-Fi issues with my setup, so I much prefer the standardized Micro USB power plug Google and Amazon are using with their dongles.

Should your TV have a USB port close enough to the HDMI port that you’re plugging the Streaming Stick Plus into, you can run power from that and not have to deal with routing power from the wall. But that also means that the Stick will shut down every time you turn your TV off and then have to restart each time you turn the TV back on.

Setting up the Streaming Stick Plus will be familiar to anyone who’s used a Roku before: you plug it in, go through some basic setup screens, and activate it on your Roku account using a phone or a laptop. Roku assumes you’re plugging directly into a TV, which mean setup defaults to controlling TV volume out of the box. If you have a receiver or soundbar you may have to adjust later in settings.

The remote is simple, yet can still control a TV’s power and volume

Roku might have the nicest, simplest remote out there. It’s chunky and nice to hold, the buttons are pleasantly clicky and intuitively placed, and there’s not a lot of random button cruft. It also has an IR blaster on the front that you can program to your TV’s power and volume commands, so it can eliminate the two remote juggle many set top boxes require. Irritatingly, the volume buttons are on the right side, which sucks if you are left-handed. I am left-handed.

Every Roku remote comes with a seemingly random selection of hard-coded buttons for various streaming services: mine came with Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV, and PS Vue. I’m never going to use PS Vue or Sling TV, and I really wish I could swap these buttons out for something I might actually use, like Vudu or YouTube. But that’s a minor issue; most people will be able to settle on the Roku remote as their primary control and put everything else away, and that’s great.

Lastly, the Streaming Stick Plus’ remote has a button and microphone for voice searches, so you can hold the remote up and speak to it. But voice search on the Roku is very simple, and cannot hold a candle to the things Siri on Apple TV or Alexa on Fire TV can do.

Content selection and playback is where every other 4K HDR streamer I’ve tested has fallen down, and unfortunately, the Streaming Stick Plus is no exception. There’s just not a lot of 4K HDR movies available to watch on this thing. In fact, there are exactly 18 4K HDR movies to watch. I know because that’s how many are listed in Roku’s 4K Spotlight app.

The issue is format support. The Streaming Stick Plus supports the HDR10 standard but not Dolby Vision, and the biggest source of HDR movies right now is Vudu, which only supports Dolby Vision. So while I own Wonder Woman in 4K HDR on Vudu, it plays back on the Roku in 4K only — no HDR. Vudu has been promising to support HDR10 for a while now, but until it does, I wouldn’t expect to watch anything other than Netflix and Amazon shows in HDR on the Roku.

(This is all particularly irritating because TCL’s $600 Roku TV supports Dolby Vision, but Roku’s external streamers don’t. Get it together, Roku.)

Lack of Dolby Vision support really limits the amount of 4K HDR content you can watch

Happily, the Roku YouTube app supports 4K HDR playback, but it’s pretty hit or miss: less than half of the 4K HDR videos from the aptly named HDR Channel actually played back in 4K HDR.

Like most other streamers, the Roku locks video output to 4K 60Hz, which is fine; most TVs can handle the pulldown to 24 fps fine now. Unlike the Apple TV, the Roku will switch HDR on and off as needed, and my 2016 LG OLED handled that without issue.

The Roku does support Dolby Atmos surround audio, and it worked fine with Vudu in my tests. But it’s pretty much limited to Vudu: Netflix only supports Atmos on 2017 LG TVs and the Xbox One, and no other service offers it all yet. I did have weird surround problems with Google Play Movies, though. I got Dolby Digital Plus audio when I watched Wonder Woman, but only stereo audio when I watched Atomic Blonde. That’s just sad.

If you’re like me and you’re looking to light up both the Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos lights in your home theater, the Roku probably isn’t for you. You’ll get Atmos, but you won’t get Dolby Vision, and the selection of HDR movies is just too small to settle. Your best bet remains the Chromecast Ultra, at least until Vudu (or another service) gets HDR10 support together.

When all of the pieces of the 4K HDR puzzle line up, the experience is amazing. And right now, it’s entirely possible to line up those pieces and watch a movie in the highest quality picture and sound that’s ever been available in a home, if you’re willing to put the work into it.

But it’s work. You have to know what HDR standard your TV supports. You have to know if the streaming service you’re using supports that standard, and if that service supports that standard on the device you’re using to stream. And then you have to plug it all in and make it all work.

The Streaming Stick Plus is another step forward, but not much of an upgrade

It’s so close to being simple, but nothing about it just works yet. Especially since every current streaming device is compromised in some way: the Amazon Fire TV has a paltry 4K library, and no Atmos content at all. The Apple TV is expensive, the default settings make non-HDR videos look bad, and there’s no Atmos support. The Chromecast Ultra requires you to juggle apps on your phone or tablet instead of having an interface. The Nvidia Shield is also expensive and requires you to join some sort of power user piracy cult to get the most out of it.

The Roku Streaming Stick Plus is another step along the path making 4K HDR just work, but until Vudu or Google or Amazon get it together and offer movies in HDR10, it’s not that much of an upgrade over an older 4K Roku. It’s amazing that $70 can get you this much in the streaming market right now, but I’m still waiting for all the pieces to fall into place.