Monday, March 25, 2013

Our current setup

For almost a year, we paid nothing at all for our home entertainment, using the methods listed in our last post.  I had been researching the Roku and AppleTV streaming boxes, which both provide a huge amount of free and subscription content to your TV with an extremely simple interface and a small easy-to-use remote.  If you are an Apple person with more than one device (iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac) and/or use iTunes to watch TV and movies as well as music, then AppleTV is probably best for you.  It seamlessly brings all of your iTunes content to your TV, has many other apps for content and entertainment, and uses AirPlay to instantly play content from another iOS device on your TV screen.

We chose the Roku box for three reasons:
1) We used iTunes for playing our imported, previously purchased music and were not buying music, TV or movies from iTunes.
2) Similar to Apple vs. Android in phones and tablets (although Roku has nothing to do with Android), Roku is a much more open system than AppleTV.  On this platform, Roku has more apps and anyone with programming knowledge can create their own apps (Roku calls them channels).
3) Roku has multiple versions of its hardware, offering different features with multiple price points.  We chose the top-of-the-line Roku, which cost the same as an AppleTV but offered better features - 1080p vs. AppleTV's 720p, plus our model has a USB port for accessing pictures, music or videos on portable USB drives or USB hard drives.

We use our Roku every day and LOVE it - so much that a month later we bought a second Roku for our second TV.  The easiest way to describe Roku is that it replaced everything we were doing on our laptop.  Using the many different channels available, Roku can stream virtually any content available online using a simple interface and an easy-to-use remote.  Roku has an "official" channel store (like Apple's iTunes app store or Google Play) as well as private channels which are user-created apps that Roku does not officially support.  Google "Roku private channels" for listings/databases of private channels and instructions on how to add them to your Roku (it's very easy).

Our Roku does everything that I was using our laptop for - streaming TV shows and movies, podcasts, radio station streams, streaming music services, plus so much more.  I occasionally watch "live" over-the-air TV for NFL football and some other network sports on the weekends, but our Roku boxes provide about 90% of the information and entertainment that we consume.  My next post will show you how easy it is to install a Roku.

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