One day, Roku might replace my very expensive Dish DVR. I can see it coming on the horizon. Right now, it's just a welcome addition to my Netflix experience. Very welcome.
I bought my Roku a couple of weeks ago, and it's the best thing since bottled beer. It's a tiny little thing the size of a small jewelery box that you barely see when you're looking at my TV. The clicker does navigation and not much else, which is a good thing if you're into simplicity. Installation took me perhaps ten minutes, and when was the last time I could say that about any new gadget? My review of Roku's performance after the jump:
I get my Roku hooked up, turn the thing on, and start watching movies from my instant queue, the same movies that I used to watch online. Amazingly, our 3 MBPS DSL was very sufficient bandwidth (I think the minimum is 1.5 MBPS) for putting online video from Netflix on my TV. I wasn't expecting miracles. I would have been happy if the picture resolution was low, but watchable. I would have tolerated an occasional rebuffering; this is coming over the Internet, after all. I certainly didn't expect anything close to near-DVD quality, but that's what I got from my piddling DSL line. Mind you, I can't even get those fuzzy and usually shitty sounding YouTube videos to not rebuffer five or six times a minute half the time on the same Internet connection, so this came as a very pleasant surprise, to say the least.
So what's on Roku? 12,000 titles, that's what. Lots of fairly recent TV shows and movies, even more classics, plus another 1,000 titles of premium-channel content from Starz. Who needs premium movie channels on cable when you get one that you control yourself with your Netflix membership?
This presents a quandry. I now have so many choices of what to put on my idiot box that I'm bound to be paying for considerable redundancy. The Roku people say there will eventually be even more channels on its teeny little box (I can haz Hulu on mah TeeVee? kthx.). There was a time when your cable company had you by the huevos, but that is about to end. Competition is a good thing, at least for people with access to some kind of broadband Internet.