- Image by vscarpenter via Flickr
Last week, Roku announced they served their one billionth stream of content after announcing they’d sold one million units. We first started talking about the Roku box two years ago when it was for Netflix only. Since then, Roku has unveiled countless channels…some good, some useless…well, to us at least.
Also, the base price for a Roku box has gone down to $59.99, and now offers Hulu Plus, Amazon Video on Demand, Pandora, MLB.Tv, NFL Gamecenter, NBA Gametime, Radiotime, etc.
Roku’s current offering is three boxes: The Roku HD, XD, and XDS. The latter two offer the options of 1080p and Wireless-N. The XDS offers a USB port and component video and optical outputs(which were built in on the original Roku). We did read of multiple complaints with Roku customer service, but never had a problem with the device worth calling about, nor has anyone else we know personally, so we cannot confirm this. We read through a lot of reviews about overseas technical support and TV connection quality, but have been unable to reproduce it.
It has a thriving community of enthusiasts and many private extra channels beyond what Roku provides…and they grow their list regularly. Even without paying for some of the subscription channels, there are hours of content to entertain, organized in a simple interface The issue with the internet is that content is everywhere…organizing it is the hard thing.
The truth is this…a HTPC will do a lot more. But it is an HTPC. The Roku is a tiny box that is basically plug and play. Even if you have an HTPC, you may not have it in every room. For us, using Linux for our DVR, services like Netflix are unavailable to us. This fills in those gaps. It also lacks a large amount of HD content, but this is more a provider issue. Full HD content online is in its infancy.
Basically, if you want a simple device that puts a lot of content in on place with very little setup required, that is not much larger than two decks of playing cards, this is the device for you. If you want something more complex…we’ll get to that in future editions.
Update: Roku has refreshed its offerings . We’ve updated the below links accordingly.
[asa_collection]Roku Collection[/asa_collection]
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- Roku Hits 1 Billion Streams Served (crunchgear.com)
- Downstreaming: Amazon Video on Demand (gadgetwisdom.com)
