Netflix on my TV
I received the Roku Netflix on-demand set-top box right before lunch today on Tuesday.
Setup took less than ten minutes, including entering the wireless MAC address into my wireless hub. It was dead simple... choose wired or wireless, pick my access point (or my neighbor's open access point with a higher strength signal), key in my wireless passkey with the remote on an on-screen keyboard... and bam, it's talking to Netflix. It gave me a five-character code I had to take to the Netflix website to identify my player, and when I got back to the living room it had already switched to a confirmation screen. From there, it's simply scroll through my "Instant" queue and select a movie to watch. It takes twenty seconds or so to buffer up the beginning of the video, but it's still a lot faster than waiting for a DVD to boot, show intros you're not allowed to skip, five second-animations between menu levels, etc.
The menus are simple and intuitive... it's almost disappointing that there isn't a lot to it. There are a few simple settings, but since you manage you entire selection of movies from a web browser (on your computer), navigation is simply limited to scrolling through your already-defined "Instant" queue.
During buffering it shows two "dots" out of four for quality, but if I pause in the middle and fast forward, it shows three dots. I watched an episode of Heroes tonight, and the quality was pretty darn good. Not DVD quality, but very acceptable on my inexpensive television.
It remembers where I am at in multiple shows, and what episode I'm ready to watch next on television series. The latter is very nice. Navigation within the show includes choppy fast-forward/reverse (fast-forwarding is limited by having to jump forward in the stream), and navigation by a selection of frames from intervals within the show. Not logical "scenes" like on a (well-designed) DVD, but apparently just every few minutes. Better than trying to fast-forward through the stream, though.
The selection on instant viewing is goofy... I get that only a fraction of Netflix' catalog is currently available for online viewing, but if you look at the first season of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, (don't laugh) the first five episodes are not available. Hmmm... the disc isn't available either. What's going on here? Has Netflix ripped this content themselves, and since they don't own a good copy of the first disc, that content isn't available? There's some agreement with this particular studio that says if you don't own the physical disc, you can't rent out digital copies? I dunno. As you progress through the series, there are three other seasons missing episodes online, though they have the disc available for rent.
(UPDATE: Okay, those first five "episodes" in Season 1 aren't episodes, they're movies that preceded the series as part of Universal Television's "Action Pack". That's probably a rights issue.)
I bought this box based on the fact that, even though the selection is limited, there's plenty of content currently available that I want to watch. This'll let me downgrade from a 4-out plan to a 3-out plan, and the box pays for itself in 15 months. But what I'm really counting on is Netflix getting more studios on board and getting a much more significant catalog for streaming.
Overall, I think it's a good deal. The box is only $100, the service is free with my regular Netflix subscription, the visual quality is very acceptable (I'm no Hi Def addict... I have a cheap TV and the box is hooked up by S-Video so it works with my input switch), and it lets me lower the cost of my monthly plan. I figure it can only get better as Netflix adds more downloadable content.