[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.