Will the Roku Rock You?
By David Fisher. Filed in technology |Tags: 1080, 720, apple, appletv, netflix, roku, streaming
Netflix has announced their Roku video player. It seems to be targeted at the On-Demand and AppleTV crowd for those wanting a simple set-top box to play video instantly on. The box is targeted at $100, and watching movies is included with your standard 8.95 or above plan. A PC isn’t required to make it work and it works over any wired or wireless broadband connection.
Sounds great right? Every Netflix movie right at your fingertips would be pretty awesome right? Well, yea it would. Sadly there’s only about 10% of the Netflix catalog available. That’s kinda lame.
Well still, it’s cheaper than the Apple TV so you should be able to get the same HD goodness for less than half the price right? Unfortunately again it’s a miss. Although it has component, HDMI, and S-video out along with optical for the audio (stereo only) it only streams and outputs at 480p. That’s Wii resolution for you. The AppleTV was bashed heavily for only doing 720p and omiting the capability to playback 1080p, this is far worse.
The picture reportedly isn’t DVD quality either. I’m fine with 480p if it’s wide screen (very little widescreen content) and DVD quality, but once you introduce artifacts at that resolution things go to hell. It doesn’t actually download them to box, but rather just streams them and eats bandwidth. I like AppleTV’s capability to actually download things to the box and free up the bandwidth later.
Netflix is still missing the boat imho in their omision of Apple support in their computer-viewing option. Not everyone has a Mac obviously, but I’d actually use the service (and consider this box) if I could watch them on my Mac.
Apple got things right with the fact that you can rent movies, throw them on your iPhone and take them on the go. They still need to enable 720p movie rentals and downloads instead of keeping that as an AppleTV only feature.
These companies do need to realize that 720p is here today, and 1080p is the future. I’m really worried about the adoption of 4k video for the future. It seems that our nation’s terrible bandwidth issue is holding us back pretty severly here.
I haven’t gotten my hands on the Netflix box and likely won’t. It’s a 4.5/10 imho and simply not worth my $100. Good idea, poor implementation.