360/PS3/Wii as media server notice

The Game Room
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I follow Rick “The Cheapskate” Broida on cnet.com as he posts a deal of the day every week day. I rarely if ever buy anything, but it’s a good way to keep track of prices of things like a 1 TB external drive, 23" LCD monitor, etc. Things like that.

Today’s deal is fantastic, and it runs to the end of the month. For $19 you get a 6 month subscription to PlayOn. PlayOn is a media server you put on your home computer, and can access with your 360/PS3/Wii, and it allows you to watch Hulu, CBS, ESPN3, the Daily Show, and other things. It also accesses Pandora, Netflix, YouTube, etc. And when the 6 months is over, you can lock into subsequent one-year renewals for $20 (12 months is usually $40).

With Hulu Plus on the PS3 (and probably soon the 360 and Wii), this is still a better deal, since that’s $8/month (unless you really want access to the extra content of Hulu Plus).

Oh, and you get Plants v. Zombies, a DVD ripper program, a cloud-based antivirus program, and a couple other goodies. AND 40% of your $19 goes to charity.

I am not affiliated with any of these, CNET, or Appsumo (the company that’s running the deal).

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I use PlayOn with an Xbox360; It’s not bad, but I lost interest when they decided to make it a subscription based service, so I’m still running the old “PlayOn Basic” or whatever they call the version they let those of us who paid for it but now don’t “subscribe” use.

It’s a little bit crotchety, overall - there’ve been a number of times where, for whatever reason, it just decided not to work, but those have been relatively few and far between. Overall, it’s been a positive experience. I remain a little bit vexed that, as far as I can tell, they STILL don’t support subtitles on MKV files played through My Media, even though it’s been “coming soon” for over a year.