Some backstory: I had back surgery in November, and things got a little rough financially. One of the things we did to save money was cancel our cable, internet, and landline phone package. We purchased a Leaf HD antenna, which basically gives us CBS, ABC, NBC, a local Fox affiliate, a bunch of shopping channels, and about 6 channels which only seem to air movies/shows from before 1965. Better than nothing, but not ideal. Now we are pretty much out of the woods financially and have been hard at work fixing up the living room, painting, carpeting, etc., and were thinking the last few months about just getting internet service and a streaming device to watch television on.
Yesterday was glorious Return of the Internet Day in our house. We had a new ethernet card, new router, and a Roku3 digital streaming box ready and waiting. The wireless router (Netgear N300) is only for the mobile devices, I hardwired both the computer and Roku 3 to the router.
Roku 3 is pretty easy to set up and use. I think some of my sub-10 year old nieces and nephews could set everything up with no help. There are dozens of channels to pick from, some paid, many free, each with their own content (movies and shows). All of the paid services I’ve tried so far have free trial periods ranging from a week to a month, so you can look through their content and decide if they have enough for you to pay for. Most seem to be under $10 a month and have tons of content.
Streaming is pretty smooth, no skipping or pixelization, even on the higher definition movies and shows. We have not tested playing online computer games while streaming television but so far everything works really well.
I think most of what we’ve watched was from Netflix. They have well over a dozen shows we’d like to watch, Futurama, The Simpsons, Scrubs, Malcom in the Middle (all seasons!), the X-Files, etc. When you’re done watching an episode, usually if you wait about 10 seconds the next one will start. We also really like Netflix for the lack of television commercials. So I think we could almost just stick to that channel and not pay for anything else and be happy with it.
You can also get YouTube, Vevo (music videos), and a bunch of other music related channels free. They have channels for the NFL, NHL, MLB, and other sports, and general sports channels like ESPN. Since I should be able to get my local NFL games on the antenna I don’t think I’ll get any sports channels.
The Roku3 saves your information, and uses that to pre-fill the registration for each channel so you don’t have to keep re-entering it. If you set audio options like captioning/subtitles, you only set it once, you don’t have to turn it on every time you watch something. The menus and Roku remote are very easy to use and navigate, there’s really only about 5-6 buttons that you need. They even include a pair of earbuds that you can connect to the remote if you want to watch something without bothering anyone else. The Roku remote doesn’t seem especially sensitive, you don’t have to wave it around and find that sweet spot to change the channels. You can point it anywhere and it works perfectly
It’s only been 2 days but we are really liking this so far. It was about $110 to set up (we bought a Roku3, an HDMI cable, and an Ethernet cable). But our monthly fee is going to be less than half what it used to be ($60 for internet, $9 for Netflix since we got the HD version, and we’re thinking of adding Hulu Plus for another $7), and we have access to waaaay more stuff than we did with our cable.
Anyone else cut their cable cord? What channels would you recommend? There’s so many to choose from! We’re still looking for one that has our British shows (Doctor Who, Top Gear, the UK cooking shows), any recommendations?