Also, I have a Sony Blu-Ray player that has lots of streaming video icons on it such as Amazon Instant video, Netfix, Hulu Plus and others. I've never tried using them but I'm wondering what the quality of the stream would be on my large-screen TV. Has anyone used the streaming services and how is the quality?
I have Roku. Picture quality is excellent on big screen.
Do yourself a favor and just find a quiet, small, used mini-tower computer w/ HDMI output and a Blue-ray capable DVD... Mine is an Acer from the Vista era... Buy a wireless nic for it (if you have to), or wired, to connect to your router to get to the internet, and a wireless keyboard... If you have a monster big-screen, you might have to upgrade the vid too (maybe a 2g card), though mine is a 4 footer, and works fine off the stock video... You are all set. You can still get to netflix, Amazon, etc... but anything you want is already freely available on the net.
I am about 4 months free of the cable now, and I will never go back. My outfit cost less than 100 bucks, saves me 70 bucks a month, and requires *no* subscription beyond the internet itself.
Quality is excellent, and normally streaming signal is too (on hi-speed cable)- If the stream gets slow, just start whatever you are watching, pause it, and walk away for 10 minutes to let it load up a ways... Same with movies... But generally, that isn't very necessary. The only thing that sucks is outage - Used to be that if the internet went down I could watch the tube, or visa-versa. Now, if it goes down I have nothing... So I am building a movie library to resolve that problem.
I have a 65” set and Amazon Prime. So I have Fire TV and access Netflix through my Fire TV unit. I have a cap on my internet usage of 350 gigs a month, which I only ever busted the first month of service. Downloading all those Dexter episodes to my DirecTV DVR racked up the gigs. Since then, I never come close to the cap.
The streaming is HD and excellent quality 99% of the time. My internet is 20 mps download and 5 mps upload. A lower bandwidth might increase the occasional compression degradation while a little higher might be perfect.