45 Days with a Roku

Roughly 45 days ago I purchased a Roku. The
theory was to drop my tv subscription and just go with streaming
content as needed to augment over-the-air hd channels. If I were the
only one living in the house, that would work fine. Others simply
like the Roku as a way to watch tv without commercials. Most
of the value of the Roku comes from [Amazon Prime Instant
Video](http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sa_menu_aiv_piv_t10?ie=UTF8&node=2676882011).
The ability to watch, buy, and instantly stream some ridiculous number of
tv shows and movies is worth the $79 per year price alone. Of course,
the more I use Amazon, the more Amazon gets to learn about me, all
designed to sell me more products. At least they're clear about this.

However, Hulu Plus is a mess. Whatever Amazon
is to simplicity and ease of use, Hulu is not. Starting the Hulu Plus
Channel in the Roku takes 30 seconds, another 10-15 seconds for the
images to come up, and then there is a 1-2 second lag between a button
pushed on the remote and the screen doing something. No other channel
has these problems. On top of it all, I get to pay $7.99 per month and
forced to watch 1-5 minutes of advertisements per show. Ugh. And finally,
after watching anything in Hulu Plus channel for a bit, I have to restart
the Roku to get it functional and responsive again.

The only thing I miss are the WRC and
MotoGP races. Maybe someone should start a
channel for that. I'll subscribe.

originally published at wiki.lewman.is