Our Roku Netflix Player arrived the other day and I set it up yesterday. One line review: KILLER!
The physical footprint is about the size of four or five CD cases, stacked. It’s small. The basic idea behind the player is that it pushes your Play Instantly selections on Netflix through your TV. It does this via your Internet connection, naturally. It’ll take a connection via WiFi or Ethernet. There’s no fan, so it’s totally quiet.
Setup is probably easiest with an unsecured WiFi connection, but if you can add a MAC address to your WiFi router, you’ll have no problem setting up a secured connection. Or you can run an Ethernet cable.
It’ll connect to all kinds of televisions. We’ve got a super old school TV with an integrated VCR (I know, BLING!), and it works fine with the included composite video cables. If you want S-video or HDMI or some other fancy thing, you’ll need a different cable, but all the right outlets are built into the box.
You add movies to your Watch Instantly queue using your computer and the standard Netflix Web site. Pretty much what you’re already used to. When you add movies to your queue, they’re instantly available through the Roku Netflix Player interface on your TV.
The included remote (they even give you the necessary two AA batteries) is small and simple to use. Very intuitive, even for knuckleheads like me. The interface on the television is a lot like Apple’s iTunes coverflow action. You scroll through your Watch Instantly movie queue using the left and right arrows on the remote. New movies are added to the far right of the queue. The interface is pretty simple at the moment, but it does the trick. As my queue grows, I’ll probably wish for at least rudimentary organizational options. My bet is that future software updates will allow for this feature.
When you watch movies, you can pause them and scroll through scenes. Just like with your DVD player, you can turn off a movie and return to the same place you left off. Very convenient.
This is great for folks with Mac-only households, since the web version of Netflix’s Watch Instantly is only available to Internet Explorer (and no, User Agent spoofing doesn’t work, I’ve tried). It’s great for households with kids–your kid movie collection just exploded! It’s killer because it overcomes the physical constraints of DVDs via mail–thousands of titles are instantly available.
If you love Netflix, this is the best $99 upgrade you could hope for.
So how about the monthly plans? How do they work with this device?
Curious about the monthly rates as well. Also, any HD content? You said it has an HDMI interface, so I wonder about current/future capabilities.
There’s no monthly fees for the player. Every Netflix account comes with access to the Play Instantly content. All the Player does is just push it to your television.
Don’t know about HD content. I assume it’s pretty slim pickin’s at the moment, since most of the Play Instantly catalog is kinda long-tail stuff. There are some TV shows (The Office, 30 Rock, etc) that are probably HD. I can’t do HD, so haven’t paid attention to it…
Ah, I should’ve been more clear. We’re on the $17/month Netflix plan. That gets us 3 DVDs at a time, unlimited DVDs per month. We also get 17 hours of Watch Instantly access each month.
Before the Player we weren’t even coming close to the 17 hours/month. We probably will now.
Just double-checked out account settings. Looks like they’ve changed ’em since I last looked. Our $17/month has UNLIMITED access to Watch Instantly content. Cool.
That looks pretty cool. I’ve used WIN on the road with my laptop both with wire and wireless & found the PC player downgraded the video quality quite a bit with wireless. Any problem with that on the Roku, or are you using a wire?
@Bruce: We’ve had no trouble running it off wifi, but we’re on FiOS with lots of bandwidth. My guess is that it’d be fine with cable or DSL wifi, too. The Player has (I think) 256MB internal memory that probably serves as a buffer. I haven’t seen a skip or stutter yet.
From the FAQ:
The minimum monthly fee to get unlimited Instant Watching is $8.99, which also gives you one-out-at-a-time unlimited DVDs in the mail.
here is the one question we all want to know but no-one has asked yet. Are you able to record the movies you like via VCR or DVD?
@T.W. Wallace: I’ve never tried, but it’s got all sorts of video output options. I’m guessing it’s probably possible.
I guess some folks might find that attractive, but since content is always in your queue until you explicitly remove it, I’ve really got no need to record anything.