The “Break it Down” Blog

Matt Young has been kind enough to send along a mini-review of the Roku, NetFlix set-top-box streaming media player used to stream the NetFlix “Watch it Now” library directly to your TV over the internet.

I had originally been concerned at the size of the NetFlix Watch-it-Now library as well as the picture quality, but Matt does bring up a good point… that if you aren’t a freaky Movie/TV junkie already, there is a ton of stuff for you to watch that you likely haven’t seen.

Here’s the full mini-review, thanks Matt!

Recently, Netflix announced that they and Roku had created a little device to allow you to stream Netflix “Watch Instantly” stuff to your TV over the net. Here’s the URL for the device:

http://www.roku.com/netflixplayer/

Using it is free as long as you have a Netflix subscription, and use of it is unlimited. The catalog of what’s available, however, is pretty severely limited, but they *do* have an awful lot of older movies, tv shows, etc… I had no trouble finding a bunch of stuff I wanted to watch… some Hitchcock movies, “The Orphanage”, a bunch of old tv shows (Voltron :))

The device is pretty awesome… just hooked it up to power, ethernet, and HDMI to my monoprice switch. Setup was a breeze… it updated itself. You use your computer to fill the queue, and the device see the stuff instantly. Streaming quality was fantastic and completely uninterrupted. It’s nice to be able to decide what you want to watch just by browsing on your computer and not waiting for anything. Well, you wait about 15 seconds for the initial buffering. For $99, well worth it.

Downsides: You can’t rip the DVD and keep it forever (but now I know I want to get the Orphanage and download it to scare other people with), not many new releases (though apparently they’re trying to broker a lot more ‘watch instantly’ arrangements), not BD quality - just DVD quality. Good for old stuff, but I still want Blu-Ray delivered by Netflix.