Netflix Player Reviews

A number of people have written reviews of the Netflix Player:

David Pogue from the New York Times shot a rather bizarre video review of the Netflix Player:

Thomas Hawk thinks that the Netflix Player will fail:

1. People don't want more boxes in their living room they want less. A satellite receiver or cable box, an XBox 360, a home theater sound system, a TiVo, an AppleTV, a DVD player, etc. etc. The last thing people want is one more ugly box cluttering up their living room.

2. The content on the box is not very compelling. Do I want Netflix "Watch Now" in my living room? Sure. Would I pay $100 to buy a box that streams me old episodes of Columbo or Xena Warrior Princess Season 1? No.

Can I get Juno on the Roku? No. Can I get Michael Clayton, or There Will Be Blood or American Gangster on the Roku? Nope.

PC Magazine reviewed the Netflix Player:

Despite minor flaws, the Netflix player from Roku offers near-instant streams of movies without increasing your subscription cost. My sincere hope is that Netflix cribs from Apple's playbook and offers a wider Instant queue selection in the future. As it is, the library still has plenty to offer, but it's only a small slice of the full catalog. If the selection improves, I'd gladly pay $100 for a box. Netflix partnerships with other manufacturers, such as LG, have been announced, and deals with at least two more unnamed partners are in the works. My guess is that eventually, the streaming feature will be part of Blu-ray players and TVs. But for now, the Netflix Player by Roku strikes me as a great value for early adopters and film addicts alike.

Dave Zatz has some great photos of unboxing the Netflix Player.

Comments

[Tom]

Thomas Hawk's #2 point is 100% correct, content is important.

[junkfood]

Got mine yesterday. Hardest part was figuring out how I was going to hook it up because I'm all out of ports on my TV. Settled for unplugging the DVD player and was up and going in 5 minutes. (This weekend I'll have to go get a switcher box.)

I tried to hook it up at the prime Net usage hours for my neighborhood so I only got 2 out of 4 on the quality scale, but it still looked as good as cable TV and the movie started playing in about 30 seconds.

[urban bohemian]

I watched that NYT video on my Tivo, very strange but kinda funny. The main points everyone seems to be making are quality and availability of content. Which are important since Netflix seems to be a master of "we're working on it".

At home my Mac Mini is connected to my HDTV, but it's useless for Netflix since they don't support Mac viewing (and the mini may only be slightly larger than the Roku Player) but they're "working on it". I would love to see the availability of closed captions on streamed video, they're "working on it".

Right now it sounds like an appealing idea, but until there's more content available, I still think $110-120 (after shipping) will be a hard sell even for the gadget queens.

[Andy Mason]

When my economic stimulus check arrives from Dubya I shall invest $100 of it in one of these nifty devices. I am British and I've noticed that there is a good portion of the Watch Instantly library that contains British TV, which is attractive to me, especially the Masterpiece Theatre productions.

My step-son has a Mac and is a Netflix subscriber. If I were to purchase one of these devices for him would he be able to create an Instant Watching queue through Netflix on his mac so that he could use the Roku player?

[Nick Sayer]

"My step-son has a Mac and is a Netflix subscriber. If I were to purchase one of these devices for him would he be able to create an Instant Watching queue through Netflix on his mac so that he could use the Roku player?"

Yes. You can use any browser to maintain your Netflix Queue - both the instant queue and the DVD queue. Once you have titles in the instant queue, you can use the Roku player to watch them.

You could also use either Boot Camp or VMWare Fusion / Parallels Desktop to run Windows and watch movies that way (so long as your mac is an Intel one).

[kh]

Thomas Hawk says: "Would I pay $100 to buy a box that streams me old episodes of Columbo or Xena Warrior Princess Season 1? No."

But I think he underestimates the number of people who would.

[Snowpuff]

I think most reviewers misunderstand this product completely. It's an inexpensive extension of your Netflix subscription. It's NOT a standalone product.

And contrary to the reviewers who criticize the content on instant viewing... for $99 TOTAL there is quite a bit of content to watch!! With more added all the time. How much is a month of satellite or cable TV compared to $99?

I'm in for one.

[Jimmy Suggs]

Does streaming video really slow down net usage that much?

[Gowan]

Speaking of people not wanting more boxes, Sony announced deals yesterday with most major cable companies to support cable card natively on their sets and develop two-way communication for cable card.

[evie]

I got mine yesterday and love it. It far exceeded my expectations in terms of quickness and QUALITY. And in terms of having another box, it's not that big a deal to me because it is so tiny. It sits next to my Slingbox on top of my Tivo. Easy. Also, I got rid of my cable box for cable cards because I never used the Video on Demand feature anyway -- the software sucked and was more painful to deal with than it was worth. The software on this unit is a dream by comparison.

I, too, am hoping for more and more content, but I like a lot of what they have now. I've been meaning to go back and watch The Office from the beginning (only started watching it recently) -- and yesterday I was easily able to start! Love it.

[Ann Onymous]

2. The content on the box is not very compelling. Do I want Netflix "Watch Now" in my living room? Sure. Would I pay $100 to buy a box that streams me old episodes of Columbo or Xena Warrior Princess Season 1? No.

It's not up to Netflix what choices go on Instant Watch. It has to due with the studios and content holders. They are the ones who give Netflix the OK to put the movie online (they even provide the digital version of the film to Netflix, so if you have quality complaints, thats also the studio).

Why would Netflix purposely not put good new releases online? And if you're wondering why more studios don't want to put brand new movies online... well, check around and you will quickly see that new movies on the internet hasn't gone too well in the past. Hopefully more studios will catch on with Instant Watch in the future as it grows and becomes more popular.

In the meantime, shutup and enjoy your Xena :-p

[Stephen Worth]

I tried to watch the David Pogue video and the first time I loaded the page, nothing showed up. The next time it sat on a screen that said "The video will start after this brief advertisement." It sat there for a full minute. Then I reloaded again and the video started playing... and stopping every 45 seconds. I wonder why more people haven't gone to streaming video over the internet?

[Old Timer Too]

I'm surprised the cost is as low as it is, considering this is the first box specifically for the NF watch now feature.

Will I bother with one? Nope.

I like the portability of DVDs too much and having brought in a bunch and then watched them on whatever TV/DVD was available (home theater, living room, or bedroom) is a nice feature.

[eviltimes]

Like biting the head off a chicken, this is another geek trick that will only lead to tears.

"So shut up and watch yer Xena."

[Belgand]

While I enjoy the occasional film in instant I generally prefer the actual disc in many cases. Some things, e.g. TV shows, generally work fine over instant and let me watch them more sporadically without having to devote one of my precious mailings to it.

The quality, however, is often far too low. The sound quality is equally low with no support for higher quality sound or any sort of actual choice. Are people really willing to give up their 7.1 DTS-ES Discrete (or even plain old DTS... or even moderately decent sound) just to watch something quickly?

Not to mention missing out on things like subtitles and commentaries or anything else on the disc. For anime especially the ability to watch in the original language with subtitles is pretty important to me and many others.

I view instant viewing as an occasionally convenient extra. Fit for a few things and often films that I know my girlfriend will have little to no interest in or that I'm vaguely interested in, but don't want to set aside a full disc for. If it was offered free on TiVo I'd be interested, but $100 for a box that does nothing else? I'm not even remotely interested even if I had the money.

[Jeff]

I just ordered one. I don't watch a lot of TV because there's never anything on that I want to see. Despite the limited catalog, I was able to quickly add 90+ titles to my watch instantly queue. With my TV habits that could take two years to watch, so now I always have something to watch when I turn on the set. That's worth $99.

I'm a sucker for documentaries and older movies, so there's plenty for me to watch. Besides, there's always another DVD in my mailbox, so I'm getting a pretty well-rounded entertainment package for a darned good price.

[Becky]

I love my Netflix Player!

[Frank]

The quality, however, is often far too low
With a braodband connection (not dsl) the quality is comparable to that of a DVD.

[Chuck Harrington]

I ordered my player the first morning of a week ago Tuesday. Got an email saying it would ship in a day or two. Then 3 days later got an email saying it would ship this week. 9 days and waiting, still no shipment. Called Roku (800) number, got a dating service. They had put the wrong phone number in the first email I got from them. The player will certainly fail if they can't deliver product. They appear to have gotten tens of thousands of orders, but may have shipped less than 3000.

[Andy]

Got mine yesterday - it's not as smart as AppleTV which you can configure to use both wired and wireless (wireless is only active when the wired link is down), but otherwise the setup was very smooth. I just upgraded to a 16M/2M Comcast IP service so I had no problems getting full quality through all 4 movies.

[Corey3rd]

far as "new" content goes, Netflix will never have the latest hot DVD title on Watch Now because the movie rights window isn't there. The film is still on Pay-Per-View. And no movie studio is going to screw DVD and Pay-Per-View to give it away on Watch Now without the same returns. On top of that, they still have their deals with HBO and Showtime. These windows have to be shut before Netflix can get the title on Watchnow. It's all about maximizing revenue streams and Watchnow can quickly damn up that flow.

[Waiting...]

David Pogue is quite possibly the most annoying man on the face of the planet.

Just making conversation as I try to pass the time while waiting on my Netflix Player to arrive.

Wow, that's some weather we're having.

[ILoveRichardSimmons]

Wow, that has to be the most annoying video I have ever watched. Although I see the guy's point he also had a few inaccuracies. First off, the picture on the Roku box is fine, the reference to DSL does not apply because the box requires a minimum of 1.5 mbps and you MUST have Broadband. Also, although Netflix is limited to 10,000 titles on IW currently their goal is to have the entire catalog available eventually. There are pro's and con's to each new device we see but this guy took about 30 seconds worth of information and thinly spread it over almost 4 minutes of footage.

Seems like a lot of hullabaloo for such an insignificant amount of information.

[Robert]

I got mine last night and am VERY impressed. I have mine hooked up via wifi using the optical audio and component video (the one with three RCA plugs) to my 50" plasma. I give it five stars. Easy set up. Beautiful picture (looks better than SD cable). Simple interface.

The only thing to complain about is the limited movie selection - but that will improve with time.

At 99 bucks, this is a no-brianer.

I thought there would be issues using it over wifi. There are none. I thought it would be the same crappy picture I get on my computer monitor when using the watch now service. It is a thousand times better.

The picture is near-HD. I am getting four dots of connection speed (on the Roku interface), so I am probably getting the best picture quality. Movies take 30 seconds to start.

Simply an amazing piece of technology.

By the way, setting it with my Harmony remote was a PITA. I had to teach it all of the commands and then fix the timing of the signals. It was sending each signal twice. I was eventually able to fix this through the troubleshooting interface.

Setting up the Roku - about 5 minutes - incluing the time it took me to fish wires to my AV receiver.

Setting up my Harmony Remote to work with the Roku - about 2 hours.

[X9]

I'm amazed at how short sighted some of the negative reviews can be. It's like they are bashing it just for the sake of bashing it.

No enough content yet? Do they think Netflix will never add more? Are they totally ignorant of the concepts of IP and licensing? What are they doing writing about media devices if they haven't passed Media 101.

"People" don't want more boxes? Did he take a scientific survey? Most likely he asked a few home theater friends who are out at about five sigmas on the Gaussian tail and called that a representative sample. I love folks who think they know what the whole country thinks.