[Macworld]

Post your comments for Roku Netflix Player here

[distortedloop]

"Even getting Instant Watching to work on a Mac via a virtualization program such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion can be a extremely difficult process."
You're kidding, right? In VMware and Parallels, all I had to do was upgrade Windows Media Player to the latest version, download a codec, and login to Netflix's Watch Now queue. That's extremely difficult?
Agreed about the content being the real issue here. It's great if you like B-rated (or worse!) TV shows from the 60's, 70's and 80's. I did a bit of sampling beyond the "in my queue only x number of movies are available for instant viewing." I went to the TV section, selected two different large genres of TV shows, COUNTED the actual number of "titles" offered in just those two categories (out of 23 categories of TV shows) and found that over 2000 titles (20% of the offerings) were old TV shows just from two genres. I'd be comfortable betting that if you counted all titles just in Television shows (Netflix makes it hard to, for obvious reasons) that you'd find maybe 70-80% are hit TV shows like the A-Team, Dragnet, The Hulk, Simon & Simon, etc, etc.
More details on what I found on my personal blog at: http://thedigitaldive.net/blog/?p=18

[Jason Snell]

Not kidding. I had to download software and spend quite a bit of time in Netflix's support forum, and even when I got it working, each viewing session required the manual download of an authentication certificate before playing. It was ridiculous, and at some point it stopped working, after which any attempts to use Instant Watching resulted in Parallels crashing.

If you had better luck, good for you, but judging by the other people I've talked to, my experience was not remotely unusual.

By the way, suggesting I didn't go beyond "x of the movies in my queue" suggests to me that you need to read the article a litlte more carefully. I did go beyond that.

[MorrisTheCat]

The Roku player sounds like an interesting device. My wife and I are recent Netflix subscribers, so this will be something I'll keep my eye on. We dropped our cable TV service recently, just because we never really watch actual TV shows anymore, so it wasn't worth the monthly cost I was being charged by Time Warner.
I think I'll give Netflix some more time to polish up the Instant Watch service a bit before I consider getting this. For $99, it's a pretty cheap investment, but I'm not sure I like the limitations of the content that were mentioned in the review. We like indie and foreign films, but it would be nice to be able to instant watch some more current domestic stuff as well.
And hopefully Roku will update the device to allow for browsing titles outside of your queue in the future. Seems like a bizarre limitation to me.

[distortedloop]

Jason Snell said:

By the way, suggesting I didn't go beyond "x of the movies in my queue" suggests to me that you need to read the article a litlte more carefully. I did go beyond that.

Oh, no, sorry for making that generic comment sound like it was directed at you. The Netflix service has been talked about for quite some time all over the net, and the most common remarks is along the lines of "x movies in my queue." I've not seen anyone go in and make any kind of actual count of titles that fall into the watch it now service beyond my own small effort.

I wish I had the time to actually go in and count each category/genre and come up with some definitive statement that could be passed around the net.

Even better would be if Netflix actually just let you see all the available titles easily.

Ironically, my argument in the past on other venues against the Netflix service was that even though they're offering "10,000 Titles" the vast majority of them are ones you wouldn't bother watching, but it's that feature that brought me back to Netflix and decide to stay with it again after an 18 month gap. There's just enough interesting stuff on it to replace channel surfing on basic cable commercial channels to make it worthwhile, and the access to some actual DVDs that I otherwise wouldn't be able to get makes the $8.99/mo plan a good deal.

Your review is the best I've read on the net of the service and the device, and I appreciate the opportunity to have commented on it.

[Jason Snell]

distortedloop said:

Oh, no, sorry for making that generic comment sound like it was directed at you. The Netflix service has been talked about for quite some time all over the net, and the most common remarks is along the lines of "x movies in my queue."

I appreciate the clarification. Yes, it's easy (and damning) to point out how few common queue titles appear on Instant Watching. After a lot of digging I ended up with 42 items in my Instant Queue, which includes a few TV series, so it's not as if there isn't a lot of content there. And of course, everyone who uses this service also gets at least 2 DVDs at home simultaneously with the streams, so that's not a bad mixture. But you are right to point out how many old 70s cop shows are on the service.

That said, I'm digging through "Weeds" and "MI5" right now, and reliving ancient "Doctor Who" stories that were much better when I was 16 years old. But at some point Netflix will need to add some better content to the service or we will all run out of things to watch. I assume they're quite motivated to grow this service, though, so there's some hope.

[Schneb]

Saved myself $100 on hardware and just restarted my iMac in Boot Camp. Instant Watch works just fine.

[Jason Snell]

Sure, if you want to watch TV on your iMac.

[cphoffman42]

I know it won't happen, but I so wish I could put this capability into an Apple TV...

[distortedloop]

Schneb said:

Saved myself $100 on hardware and just restarted my iMac in Boot Camp. Instant Watch works just fine.

I'm using my MacBook Pro with Parallels to output via DVI cable to the big screen. Not a perfect solution, and not quite as nice as a dedicated set top box like the Roku, but it saves me the $99 for a first generation device that is bound to have cheaper better solutions out the door pretty soon. Rumors of NetFlix licensing other designs already floating around.

cphoffman42 said:

I know it won't happen, but I so wish I could put this capability into an Apple TV...

Never say never, but you're probably correct. Apple's the roadblock to it, though, not NetFlix. If you check out the NetFlix blog, there's a post on it from one of the executives about how many NetFlix employees are Mac users and want to see the service on their Macs as much as the rest of the Mac community does. The issue is the same that we face with several other media players, DRM. Apple won't license out Fairplay, and no one else has DRM that works on a Mac. I'd be surprised to see Apple allow any streaming media service on its AppleTV product, as it would be in direct competition to their purchase/rental model on the aTV. Maybe a partnership deal someday, i hope?

I'm really leaning towards picking up a Mac Mini to replace my AppleTV. It's not cheap, but the limitations of the AppleTV, including not being able to emulate Windows to run something like this are getting frustrating. Had I known back when I bought the aTV (opening day of sales, like a good little rabid fan boy) what I know now, I never would have grabbed one. It would have been a Mini then and there.

[wardoggie]

distortedloop said:

Even better would be if Netflix actually just let you see all the available titles easily.

There's a tab on the Netflix home page called "Watch Instantly" for that. Lots of ways to browse, plus you can create a queue just for stuff you want to watch instantly.

[mickeyblanchard]

Instant Watching works fine for me as well. I use a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Mini hooked to my projector running Leopard with Vmware Fusion running Windows XP. It installed on the Mac as smooth as it did on my laptop Windows XP PC. I just purchased a new 24'' iMac, I will try to install it on that tonight.

[cphoffman42]

I have been torn between getting an Apple TV or a Mac Mini. The Apple TV seems to have a pretty good interface and the ability to rent movies directly from it is pretty cool. But, the lack of a decent size hard drive is a big downer, esp. since I haven't had a desktop computer since like 2002, so I am running on laptop-sized hard drives. I would love it if I could rip all of my old DVDs and put them on the Apple TV, but it would take up so much hard drive space I couldn't justify (yes, I know about external hard drives, but I don't want to (a) plug in an external every time I want to watch a movie or (b) spend hours transfering everything over to my Airport drive). So I was thinking maybe the Mini would be a better fit. It would also act as a DVD player, so maybe I could get rid of that behemoth. But, it lacks the HDMI output of the Apple TV. Grr.

Also, agree 100% that it is Apple preventing Netflix downloads on the Apple TV. I probably wouldn't mind (and would probably cancel my Netflix subscription) if iTunes had a better selection of movies. Oh, and if you could rent TV shows. I might want to watch the first season of Weeds, but that doesn't mean I want to keep it forever. So why do I have to pay to keep it forever?

[wardoggie]

Schneb said:

Saved myself $100 on hardware and just restarted my iMac in Boot Camp. Instant Watch works just fine.

I did the same thing (albeit on my macbook pro) to test the quality of video over my DSL connection. I was surprised at how good the "high" quality video looked, and that might end up costing Roku a sale... at least in the near-term. I may eventually get this box, or something similar, because of the convenience (no rebooting) and the ability to watch on a much larger screen.