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An Early Review of Roku's Netflix-Streaming Appliance

Posted by timothy on from the standard-of-living-gets-another-upgrade dept.

Robert Green writes "Following and complementing the Netflix instant streaming video service for the PC, Roku has produced a Set-Top Box offering instant streaming of Netflix video to your home television set. Set to compete with Apple TV (major announcement pending), it began shipping last week and here is one of the first reviews." As has been discussed before, the device is fairly limited, but inexpensive (around $100).

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. How About No? by morari · · Score: 0, Troll

    For $15 a month, I can just rent regularly from NetFlix, pirating about thirty films per month. The trick is to send all three films back the very day they arrive, that way you can get two batches a week. ;)

    --
    "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
    1. Re:How About No? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 0, Troll

      and the quality of the video was better than most dvd players

      impossible. absolutely impossible. especially with upsampling players (or almost any HTPC that rescales dvd data to higher res.)

      I belong to netflix and I rent heavily. I rip to my home NAS to queue things up which I'll watch later (at MY convenience). when I'm done, the movie may get kept or deleted, it depends on how I feel and how much spare storage I have.

      with a streaming 'DRM' player I'll not be able to schedule things on my terms. therefore this player is worthless to me.

      upsampled DVD's can be quite good; so good that I have decided not to buy into the HD opto formats and just record OTA HDTV or rip dvd's to my home NAS/HTPC system.

      you also go on to rant:

      The days of hacking and pirating are over and as soon as we can convince the entertainment industry

      convince? there's no dealing with the devil; you will always lose. we know that now and we are DONE trying to 'work' with the EI. bargaining time is over and we already have what we want. too bad for them, too; but they had a chance to play nice with us and they blew it. game over. we decide on OUR TERMS what the EI relationship will be with us. OUR TERMS.

      they hate that. but the horse has already left the barn.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  2. Re:Advantages over computer - HDTV? by BoogeyOfTheMan · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yes, sadly, people ARE that stupid. I work in retail electronics and most customers are unaware that you can hook up an HDTV to most modern pc's easily. I even have customers that know you can hook up an HDTV to a pc, but assume it has to have a monitor port on the back of the tv, so they disregard every other tv for ones that "can be used as a monitor". I'd be lucky to find 3 customers in a month that even knew what a dvi port was, much less if thier pc has one.

    But honestly, the big advantage to this box is that most people dont keep thier pc anywhere near thier main viewing tv. Unlike most /. readers who would probably build a second (or 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc) pc to play media on thier tv.