Netflix Roku Movie Player
Review by Robert Young-Pullman | Published June 2008 | Review Archives

Remember ON-TV? How about Spectrum? These were early pioneers in cable TV - or figuring out a way to bring movies into your living room without destroying the motion picture industry as we know it. Since those dark ages of non-stop re-runs of C.H.U.D. and Cheech and Chong's oeuvre, there has been remarkably little evolution in on demand movie delivery. Sure, everyone has access to cable now, but short of getting a little box or a hotel room for Pay-Per-View, there still isn't much to make you excited. And in the meantime, at least a half-dozen companies have released products (Akimbo, the Apple TV, Unbox, etc.) to entice you to buy yet another cute little box and stream movies over internet broadband lines.

But people are getting so excited about the Netflix Player that I pushed aside my (completely unused) Apple TV to make room for it. The big difference? First, the cost: at $99, the Netflix Player is less than half the price of their main competitors as well as those set-top box companies that have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Second, the company: Netflix is a big player already in movie delivery, even if their customer base is mostly made up of people ordering them online and getting them in the mail. While this doesn't necessarily mean they have any idea what they're doing with delivery to your TV via the internet, it does mean they have a brand name and the resources to stick it out for awhile, and your $99 box may not become a paperweight a few months after you buy it.

And how does it drive? The installation is a little dodgy (it's easy, but requires you to get up from your couch and use a computer to activate it), but once it's done and you're logged in to your Netflix account, you get your choice of 10,000 movies to watch an unlimited amount of times. While that sounds great, most of these are classics and back catalog - great if you miss those re-runs of Mary Tyler Moore, bad if you're expecting to see any of this summer's blockbusters prior to Thanksgiving. The quality isn't bad, but is still a significant slump from DVD (in fairness, no one else has figured out a way to buffer DVD-quality video over the internet without huge waiting times, either). The films pick right up within seconds, scanning is sound, and it remembers where you switched off should the real world intrude at all in your me-time. All in all, a decent, if not ideal, package - and one that will almost certainly still be in existence a year from now.