Roku3 The Versatile and Affordable Media Streaming Player
I remember when I was 19 and our first VCR was brought into the house back in 1982, a large Toshiba with a remote that had a cable connecting it to the unit. The controls were simple: play, stop, rewind, fast forward, and record.
It was heavy, it was expensive, and it took VHS tapes. The very idea of the VCR was tied directly to the notion that television was the main form of entertainment. Television came to the house via the airwaves, and the VCR let you record those events and watch them later. Rented tapes let you augment the broadcast experience. Making your own entertainment with porta-paks (VCRs with cameras attached, basically) was another form of entertainment, as was connecting a computer like an Acorn Electron or a Commodore Amiga to the back of the VCR with a cable was another. Today, the Internet is the source of entertainment for more and more people. Could it be that the ‘net is the source of entertainment for MOST people now?
The internet took time to develop as such a a dominant and ubiquitous form of entertainment. It began as a non-commercial form of exchange between government officials and scholars who wanted to annotate documents. A noble aim. As compression technologies and bandwidth have increased since the early 1990s, and accelerated in the past five years, now over half of the internet traffic, some have argued, is taken up by Netflix and Youtube. Video streaming is demanding on bandwidth, and there is massive demand.
Part of this demand is the rise of the dedicated set-top-box media stream player. Such a player is the Roku3.
The Roku3 media streaming player works right out of the box. I was surprised at first by how small it was, expecting anything that connects to a TV to be much bigger.
Roku players connect directly to your TV and to your high-speed Internet service via your home network.
1. A TV
2. HDMI cable for high definition.
3. Broadband Internet connection with a Wi-Fi router.
There are no recurring fees for using our players, and every player is packed with hundreds of free channels to enjoy right out of the box. While we don’t charge a monthly subscription, some the Roku partners do. You choose what you pay for and what you don’t. You access your existing subscriptions like Netflix, Hulu Plus or MLB.TV, all the usual providers.
Pandora, SOMA FM and Spotify are there, as is a useful USB player app that lets you play directly from any compatible USB drive, effectively turning the ROKU3 into personal media player.
I recommend the ROKU 3.
Here is the link to the Roku3 website