TV Alternatives – Roku Player

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This topic continues to weigh on our minds. We’re convinced that as cable/satellite prices continue to rise, and as these companies insist on shutting down analog, it will be impossible for us to continue as we have, which is why we continue to prepare for an eventual paradigm shift.

Where we live, our cable provider, who has a monopoly in our neighborhood, has shut off analog service, encrypted most things we could get with a digital tuner, and been generally uncooperative. As of now, with some threats and cajoles, it is still cost effective to have cable.

Meanwhile, we have relatives whom we visit for holidays and weekends. The cable company there has not yet dropped analog cable there, and offers the standard cable package unencrypted. One TV has a digital box, and the rest use built in tuners. We’re certain that they will eventually drop analog, and for a house that swells during a holiday/weekend from only needing a bedroom and living room television to a house with all bedrooms filled with people with different television watching habits, it isn’t cost effective to rent one $10(which is what they charge), per TV.

Worse, unlike our urban residence, this more rural setting gets no broadcast transmissions, making cable or satellite the only television option. Fortunately though, it makes for the perfect testbed for our exploration. It is winter here, and our visits become less frequent, but we intend to be prepared for spring.

We’re very interested in the Roku Netflix Player, which late last month introduced a firmware update to allow it to stream Netflix‘s HD content. Since this device is portable, it could be brought into any room and movies streamed directly to it. When the item came out, the New York Times blogged about its thoughts on the future. We have our thoughts with theirs, below:

  • The price point of this device is $99. Keeping the price point this low allows for widespread adoption
  • It doesn’t require an always-on server at the owner’s house to work…although we wouldn’t complain if it doubled as a uPnP/DLNA server so it could stream from a local system if we wanted it to.
  • The device is capable, through firmware updates, of adding new content from other sources than Netflix, and Roku has promised such change in the new year, which may make this device sell out, as we’re not going to buy one until we know what other content is coming. The device supports flash and other formats, so the frontrunner may be Hulu, which would be a gem if offered directly to one’s television.
  • Rather than requiring you to sort through the 10,000+ offerings, you can narrow it down on your computer, and select from a reduced subset.
  • Third-party plugins – Roku is offering a free software development kit to any online video content provider who wishes to add a channel of content alongside the Netflix content. Aside from the channels Roku has been promising, this would allow a third party to take control of their plugin to ensure it met their standards. On the open source side of things, we’re hoping that the developers of several open source media projects find a way to stream to the device. After all, while it is designed to be independent of a computer, that doesn’t mean it could not optionally offer content that is dependent as well. Of course, this goes back at its simplest to the uPnP support idea.

If this device was extended to uPnP, we’d set up an old computer to serve media files and buy a box for several televisions. A $99 flat rate is better than a $10 a month rental rate.

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1 thought on “TV Alternatives – Roku Player”

  1. Totally agree, if it was a UPnP media client (it could be another “channel”), that would be over the top cool. Though I worry Roku isn’t interested, because that could eat into their premium and free 3rd party channel relationships.

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