We subscribe to Netflix and have loved the service. Though of late we've lapsed in our movie watching ventures, in-part because of the recent film fest (I saw 50 there) and in-part because we're doing other things.
But now Netflix has a device you can buy and stream movies over the internet to your television: Roku.
I read about it on May 20th in the New York Times and after a little research, I bought the device. It arrived on Thursday and took me all of ten minutes to set up (which could have been shorter had I remembered my Netflix password).
Now, we have thousands of films at my fingertips. No more waiting for the mail. No more lost envelopes. No more discs laying around for weeks waiting for me to slip it into the DVD player.
To top it off, we now only pay $8.99/month to see all the movies I want to see. We get one at a time by mail, but we can get an unlimited number of films each month, by both mail and streaming internet.
The picture and sound quality on our HDTV is stunning--at least as good as DVD quality, and sometimes better.
The New York Times says:
Because of the way Hollywood sells rights to its products, most of the Internet titles are more than five years old, although there are some newer independent films and TV shows.For my money, though, I'd rather have independent films and TV shows at my fingertips than the usual Hollywood fare.
And if there's something I really really want to see that isn't in the "on-demand" list, I can just add it to my queue and wait a couple of days to get it in the mail. In the meantime, I'll be catching up on episodes of This American Life (from Showtime), watching movies I missed in the theaters that I really wanted to see, and re-watching some of my old favorites (like Jesus of Montreal and Bagdad Cafe and Salmonberries).
