My new Netflix Roku rocks

Pardon me for believing that Netflix introduced their new movie streaming box just for me, but with my DVD player recently dying and my Netflix account basically wasting away how could I think otherwise when Netflix rolled out the ability to stream movies directly to my living room.  The fact that it had an HDMI output (which happens to be the only spare cable I have running from my TV at the moment) was just gravy.

Seriously though, I was pretty stoked to add this to my account (and for only the cost of a $100 piece of equipment).  I know the hard core Apple users out there are going to tell me I should have bought the AppleTV thing, but I want my content rented and streamed, not owned and impossible to access if I don’t follow the Apple DRM rules. 

It could not have been easier to set up (less than 10 minutes – fully half of which was me trying to figure out how to crimp on a new end connector on the CAT5 cable running from my media cabinet to the router). Once online, I plugged the device in, it game me a code to type into my Netflix account and in about 30 seconds I was ready to go.  Streaming quality is excellent and the buffering delay is generally less than 10 seconds at the start of each show. And I’ve only had one major blow-up (the system dropped and reset itself) in over 10 hours of watching content.

My only complaint is the one everyone seems to have come up with already – there’s just not enough content available on demand (for example not a single movie in our queue was available for streaming). I have to believe the people at Netflix are frantically working on this problem.  Once they solve it they’ll have one rockin’ service.