We’ve added other channels, like CNN and PBS, but for the most part we were watching our usual mix of Amazon, Hulu and Netflix.īy itself, the Roku was a massive improvement over our previous setup. For the baseball fans in the audience, it supports MLB.tv, so you can watch any game except those that involve the home team (unless you get creative: think VPN). A little bigger than a hockey puck, the Roku was unobtrusive and offered us – finally – the ability to watch content from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix and so on without messing around with a keyboard and mouse. Setup was simple enough that I’m pretty sure that my parents could complete it without assistance. We bought a Roku XD – which will do 1080P HD, but not play games – at Amazon for about two dollars off the devices suggested $79 retail price. But more importantly, the Apple TV wouldn’t connect to either Amazon Instant videos or HuluPlus, both of which we subscribe to. In spite of the two Mac laptops, the Mac Mini and my wife’s iPhone, we don’t really consider ourselves an Apple household. Either would at a minimum return us to a world containing remote controls, but I had to determine which to get. The first decision to make was Apple TV or Roku (Boxee got no votes from my audience). In 2012, we had no effective remote control.
Because that meant getting up and using the mouse or keyboard to pause the video. If we wanted to watch something together, then, we manually queued it up on the Mini via a browser, manually expanded the Flash or Silverlight player to full screen and then prayed we wouldn’t need to pause it for any reason. Up until this week, however, our multimedia experience was terrible, especially for a household with one member whose employment description includes “technology analyst.” Aside from watching Amazon or Netflix videos on our laptops, we had an old Mac Mini connected to my old Sharp Acquos 37″ TV.
The downstream impact of this attrition will be interesting – and in the case of efforts to kill net neutrality, horrifying – to watch, because the carriers for us are what they refuse to be: a dumb pipe. We’re not alone, obviously: more and more people are cutting the cord every year. It’s more the cost: we don’t really see the point of paying almost a hundred dollars a month for hundreds of channels we’ll never watch. It’s not really a question of content, exactly: there are several shows she watches regularly, and I’d love to have Red Sox games in the house.
Neither my wife nor myself had cable when we met, and even as a couple we never bothered to subscribe. Update: For specific implementation details including recommended hardware and costs, see the follow up post here.
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