How much can you watch on Roku? It looks interesting, but I wasn’t clear that you could get much beyond GBTV.
Can you stream straight from the internet on it and watch anything you can now watch on your computer? Or do you pay a monthly fee in addition?
I got it just to watch Beck but there are over 100 channels with most of them free that can be added to the lineup. Not really sold on it for a broad based solution but it offers more than the WD TV Live thingy.
I actually bought the WD TV to playback the in-car videos for some of the racing teams I do data work for so they didn’t hog up my computer keeping me away from doing the data analysis. I can connect it to the TV and surf the net with wireless keyboards and such, which I am still trying to find out of it can be done with Roku.
I am still looking for a better solution but like when DTV first came out, it had its growing pains as well. I think the move is on the specific subscription services on-line rather than the one size fits all solution DTV is mire in.
You use a Netflix or other streaming subscription for movie or TV content. Roku has, for example, last night’s NBC News in full w/o commercials available the next day as well as Fox News Sunday (which may be live, I can’t recall). The rest of the news content from all the networks is excerpts, podcasts or vodcasts. There are a series of 2 minute cooking tips on CHOW. My husband watches SAIL TV. There are well over 100 separate channels, including music. We use Pandora for music.
All of those are free. There are other free and subscription channels available, check it out at roku.com.
We were early adapters with a Roku. The first one had buffering problems with our DSL and it kept losing the connection to the Internet and would need to be rebooted. It seemed to stress our modem. You can go either ethernet or wireless. We upgraded to a Roku II and have had few problems. GBTV has given me some problems in transmission, but the reload function is quick and picks up where you were cut off. It may be a GBTV problem, I don’t know. With DSL, you cannot download/upload to the Internet via computer while watching a movie, but we have been able to read an already downloaded website while a movie is playing. Roku II also has a usb function for game players.