Nedtflix And Roku Team Up To Battle AppleTV
Roku and
Netflix have teamed up and released a very sweet little movie streamer that may give the
AppleTV a run for their money soon. Netflix has allowed subscribers to stream movies to their PCs for some time now, but this little device allows you to watch them on your nice big TV. The big advantage this has over the
AppleTV is that it is only $99 and it uses your monthly subscription to get unlimited movie streaming.
The Netflix Player connects via HDMI, Component, S-Video and Composite for video and with digital optical and RCA for audio. Setting it up was a breeze. It can use a wireless connection or wired and configuring either was very straight forward. Once you are connected you are given an access code that you then need to enter on your Netflix account page. The device responds near instantaneously and you are now ready to start adding movies to your queue. Here is where this amazing device starts to have problems and why we think they will give the AppleTV a run for their money in the future and not right now. First you can't browse the available movies via the device. You must use the Netflix website to add movies to your 'instant queue'. Second, the list of available movies is fairly limited as of now. Unless you are a big fan of some of the later 1980's movies you might want to wait on this. If they expand their lineup of movies you can stream this could be a top shelf device.
In terms of quality we were extremely impressed. The picture quality looked great to us and the streaming quality was much better then we thought it would be. There is no internal hard drive to cache anything with and yet the movie started right away and we never saw any hiccups or stutters.
We are going to continue to play with this and also watch to see how the movie collection expands so stay tuned for more information.
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Posted by David Ficocello at May 29, 2008 6:00 AM
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