Roku Rocks

For Paula’s birth­day I bought her a lit­tle device called the Roku Dig­i­tal Video Play­er. Basi­cal­ly, it takes Net­flix stream­ing videos and dis­plays them on your tele­vi­sion.

This is very good for us since we don’t have any tele­vi­sion ser­vice. When we moved into our new place a year ago we decid­ed that our cable bill was 90% waste, so we can­celled it and we watch tele­vi­sion series on DVD through Net­flix or on the com­put­er now.

So I bought this Roku device which takes the 12,000 or so stream­ing videos avail­able on Net­flix (and the 40,000 or so avail­able on Ama­zon as pay-per-view) and lets you watch them on your nor­mal tele­vi­sion.

The Roku box is amaz­ing. It only does one thing and it does it well. The images are crisp, the audio is clear, and the inter­face is very easy to use. In my opin­ion, the videos dis­play much bet­ter than they ever did on my lap­top or our desk­top com­put­er.

If you use Net­flix and ever watch stream­ing videos, you should seri­ous­ly con­sid­er the Roku. It rocks.

And it costs less than a few months of cable — even when you com­bine it with your month­ly Net­flix bill.