Gadget Wisdom

We love the idea of the Roku Video Player, formerly the Roku Netflix Player. We’ve been talking about it from early on, and have used one, although we admit to not owning one(not yet, at least).

Today, Roku started releasing a major update for the box. It includes ten new content channels:  Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe.

Now, there are some disappointments there. These are good sites, but nothing show stopping, like Hulu, or even Youtube. And the fact they haven’t incorporated streaming from your own home computer is equally disappointing.

The Roku Channel Store, the platform under which these new channels were launched, hopes to become a platform for future development. We’d love to see that.

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• Roku announces Roku Channel Store, adds Facebook and Pandora (and maybe porn!) (crunchgear.com)
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Time to catch up on the latest from these two services.

• Playboy seems to think Hulu is coming to the Roku Video Player. That would certainly please us. But Roku, the creator of the player, has insisted they have not made any public statements regarding Hulu and they don’t know where Playboy gets their information. Roku currently supports Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix, and promised as many as ten new channels by the end of the year but has not yet delivered.
• Netflix appears to not recognize Puerto Rico as part of the United States and is blocking the territory’s use of its Watch Instantly feature, something Hulu once did. It explicitly excludes anything outside of the fifty states and the District of Columbia.
• Hulu has added its own application for playing outside of a browser which works on Windows and Mac(but not Linux). In a ‘nod’ to Boxee, certainly a more developed product, the new product originally advised you to kill Boxee on Macs to avoid conflicts. This has since been changed. Hulu’s Terms of Service state that: “You may not download, install or use the Hulu Software on any device other than a Personal Computer including without limitation digital media receiver devices (such as Apple TV), mobile devices (such as a cell phone device, mobile handheld device or a PDA), network devices or CE devices (collectively “Prohibited Devices”).” It does not prohibit hooking a computer to a TV, but it seems to suggest this is the thing Hulu is trying to forbid, which does not bode well for them.

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• Hulu’s Desktop Wants You to Keep Internet TV Out of the Living Room (cultofmac.com)
• Amazon Video on Demand Support Making the Rounds (gadgetwisdom.com)

Yesterday, we wrote both on Roku Netflix Player, and on Amazon Video on Demand. EngadgetHD reports today that Amazon Video on Demand will be available on the box after a free software update early this year. Any of Amazon’s 40,000 other titles will be able to be purchased and played back to the TV for a 24 hour window. Unfortunately, the maximum bitrate is only h.264 compressed 1200Kbps. No HD as yet.

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