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.
Thanks, I appreciate the info.
An ordinary old computer works just fine for the task.