[narrowrail]

I've been considering replacing my media PC with a Roku, so I'm curious why you would call them "empty plastic boxes" considering the Roku can stream from my local server and I block all outbound requests at my router (firewall). The advantage I see is the 5W power draw vs. my current 20W. I'm also unclear on what interoperability would mean for one of these devices. I don't think 2 Roku on the same network have any capacity to communicate either (maybe I'm wrong?).

[wpietri]

I'm not krisdol, but I presume the "empty plastic boxes" is a reference to the fact that the amount of hardware necessary to stream video is now miniscule. My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

And interop for me would mean that instead of N proprietary platforms that must be targeted separately by software/content makers, there would be one universal platform with different manufacturers. The Amazon app on Roku, for example, is pretty weak; I presume it's much better with an actual Amazon device. And YouTube wasn't available on Roku for a number of years, even though you could get it on other devices, I presume because Google was trying to make their own device play with Google TV.

[narrowrail]

I agree with your take, but I don't see that happening; I prefer to take care of media acquisition on my own because I don't trust these companies to do any differently than the media companies they seek to, ultimately, replace.

Roku has the private channel feature that I think makes it more interesting than the other players, and I wish more effort was exerted to explore the possibilities with private channels. Have you used this feature?

It seems to me that if the streaming providers had better APIs, the device makers could make use of them; I imagine Amazon's devices have access to private APIs that Roku does not.

[jsingleton]

I picked up a new Sky Now TV box for 8 GBP (with cashback). It's basically a re-branded Roku but you can't get all the channels. Still, quite the bargain considering it even comes with an HDMI cable. It has all the standard catchup apps such as BBC iPlayer but no Netflix (Sky are competitors).

It also has a developer mode which may be what you are referring to. I managed to side-load Plex onto it. If the Netflix app code was available then I guess that could be side-loaded too. Only one development app can be loaded at a time though.

I also looked at doing some development but the VBScript brings back too many bad memories. :)

http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/guides-tutorials/media-guid...

[wpietri]

I haven't. I use the Roku to put things like Netflix and Amazon on the big screen. I remember trying a few different things to put content from my server on the Roku, but I could never get it to work smoothly; there were hitches both with the on-Roku software and with encoding issues. Instead I just bought an Intel NUC for that.

In a few years I hope I can replace them both with some sort of Android device, but for now I don't mind two devices.

[asdfkajh2]

>My Roku is the size it is not because it needs to be that big to hold components, but so that it looks substantial to consumers and doesn't get lost in a ball of cables.

Are you sure its not because multiple-generations-removed miniaturization technology is cheaper, and the latest Roku devices are under $100? Or that perhaps it's a different economic driver, rather than so the consumer sees its physical size?

Regarding the second app, I think the issue is again non-technical -- content is not available across devices because it's a differentiator. It may seem an artificial barrier -- your Roku can decode any video stream -- but the structure of a system that created the content suggests otherwise.

Sounds like things are ready for interoperation except for the human/economic/structural element.

[metaphor]

Assuming $50.00 for a Roku, electricity at $0.15/kWh, and 16 hours average daily usage, breakeven point is in ~3.8 years vs. an existing 20W solution.

[CydeWeys]

16 hours daily usage?! Whoa nelly, that's a lot of TV watching! I suspect a lot of people on here (like me) watch less than one hour a day. The US national average is five hours, which is still startlingly high, but doesn't get you close to 16 hours per day even with multiple people in a household (as their viewing times will tend to overlap).

I suspect that stand-by power usage may be more important than active power usage for such a device. And I don't know how Roku fares for that, nor its alternatives.

[metaphor]

The point of the disillusionment exercise was to carefully select parameters that favored narrowrail's perceived "advantage" in an improbable but still realistic way.

In other words, assuming a proverbial couch potato got a sweet deal on a new Roku 3 and pays up the wazoo for electricity, it would take a solid 4 years of usage in the prescribed manner before breaking even on a relatively small investment, rendering any perceived power savings "advantage" over an existing 20W system null...let alone other considerations like product MTBF, lifecycle, the next trending 6-second attention getter, interoperability, etc.

[TsiCClawOfLight]

Get a small, open system. I own a CuBox, but something like a Raspberry Pi 2 would work just as well.

Install some linux distribution (I use OpenELEC) that boots into Kodi (formerly xbmc).

Seriously. No proprietary thing I have ever seen matches the features and usability of Kodi. It's an amazing piece of open-source software.