Heather and I received our new Roku set-top box in the mail a few days ago and so far we are very pleased with it. We used to use Blockbuster’s plan but ever since they decided to drop the only significant advantage that they had over Netflix then they ceased to have a compelling offering for us. And we were even on the old grandfathered-in pricing scheme with 3-out, unlimited exchanges for ~$20/month, not the $30/month or so that they charged in the interim period before the new exchange policy. So, couple of months ago we switched to Netflix at the 3-out at a time plan and haven’t looked back. The price is a bit cheaper for the disks-by mail (~$17/month), the selection is far better, and movies are actually in stock in general instead of being on long wait for nearly a year at a time.
But, we aren’t very disciplined about scheduling all of our movie watching so carefully around the USPS delivery schedule. Hence, the Roku-Netflix box. It fills the gaps in the delivery schedule and makes it so we can watch some of the more frivolous TV without worrying about returning something half-watched or “wasting” a disk.
The setup was basically painless, other than I couldn’t find the spare HDMI cable that I swear is laying around somewhere in the house. I did manage to find a spare set of RCA cables to use for a component connection though, and that seems to be working pretty well so far. We’re only on 1.5 Mbps DSL because I hate the cable company so we can get 4-dots of quality but no HD so far. But either way, the video quality is really very good and I haven’t had a single playback issue like stuttering or skipping yet. Overall a very impressive product.
For quite some time now I’ve felt that internet TV is clearly the direction that television and post-theater movies are headed. It’s kind of exciting to watch TV and movies on the Roku box and realize that this is one of the first devices of that makes this a reality for us.
They just need a little additional selection, particularly in the new-release TV category and we could almost drop the discs. The other major improvement that it could use would be to tweak the buffering a little bit so that you could jump backwards up to 30 seconds or so in increments of 5 or 10 seconds so that you don’t have to wait for a full re-buffer if you just missed a little bit of dialog.
On a related note, I just watched Man on Wire on the Roku box and really enjoyed it. It’s hard to fully imagine standing between those towers suspended by nothing more than a braided steel cable. I also thought that the storytelling was really very well done.