Hi everyone,

Installed in Chicago now, and moving into a new apartment next week. Was considering getting a Roku box - anyone have any thoughts? Seems like most people tell me cable definitely isn't worth it.

Stay warm, fellow mid-westerners!

Siv

I agree that cable isn't worth it, but then I'm not sure Roku is either. We've been entirely TV-less for almost a year, and neither Mrs P nor I really miss it at all.

Well, that's the other option, of course. At the moment my husband is sending over bits and pieces from the UK that he downloads. It's only the odd show we'd watch :/

Weighing it up..

We have used the Roku for over a year. We subscribe to only one paid channel, AcornTV, which plays a lot of British shows, and we use Amazon Prime to access a lot of things we might ordinarily pay for (I'd get Amazon Prime anyway since I buy a lot on Amazon). Everything else we watch is free. We are really happy with it and the fact that we don't pay for cable. We mostly use it for movies, news, weather, music, and some TV series, and we really don't care about not seeing TV shows the instant they are out. My husband likes the Plex channel to download and watch his YouTube favorites. The Roku is pretty flexible and we find enough to watch but you may not like it if you have your weekly favorite TV show, your live sports, or anything live really.

I'm with you, Pulaski. Before I met my husband, I went quite happily without TV for 25 years. Someone stole my TV in college, I couldn't afford to replace it, and I realized I hadn't turned it on in weeks anyway.

Why not purchase a Blu-Ray player with streaming capability and get two for one? Also more and more TVs have streaming built into the TV.

Samsung Blu-Ray Player with WI-FI

Our Roku has now just been relegated to using for netflix. You can't (or couldn't, I haven't checked recently) use it for Hulu, only Hulu Plus (which you have to pay for) and the youtube interface isn't wonderful.

Instead I'd go for either a blu-ray player that does what you want, or find some way to stream from a pc onto your tv. Then netflix ($8 a month), Hulu (free) and youtube (free but limited) are your friends.

I'm confused. My internet provider is my cable tv provider. Can I opt out of Cable tv and get reasonable tv content over the internet connection? What does a roku do for me? DVR?

Samsung uses "Smart Hub" on their TVs and Blu-Ray players. The TVs even have a built in browser but the design of the remote to control the browser is cumbersome. If they get a good interface for the browser (mostly software and a mouse like device is needed), then it should work similar to a laptop.

Samsung Smart Hub

More on Samsung Smart Hub

Some things you pay for and others are free.

The following is the Samsung TV Smart Hub remote.

We've got a samsung smart tv, but rarely use it for anything other than pandora radio as it is so cumbersome. We have a Roku box on to provide a better interface for streaming from Netflix and amazon prime. That said, I haven't watched anything at all on tv for over 2 weeks now, and all wife is watching are Korean soap operas. If you haven't discovered that particular joy yet, you really should .......

We have a Vizio smart TV, and we moved out Roku to the bedroom as the TV is so good.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube etc.

Very occasionally we will plug my MacBook Air into the TV (when streaming Iplayer through a VPN) but other than that our smart TV has everything we want.

The interface is pretty good, YouTube can be a pain but it allows you to pair your mobile device and search for content on there - negating the horrible text entering.

Which VPN do you use?

Overplay

Have Vizio revamped their smart tv interface recently? We have a 3(?) year old Vizio that we took out of a rental, and one of the reasons we bought Samsung for our main TV was that (for us) the smart side seemed better, although the sales guy was very upfront about its shortcomings. The thing that bugs me most is that most of them suffer from the onscreen pointer style keyboard...I saw some (lg maybe?) had started putting qwerty keyboards on their remotes, which is an improvement, but I'd like to find a proper keyboard that I can pair with it....any ideas?

I have both a roku and an Apple TV. The Apple TV gets much more use for me because of the ability to airplay from my iMac, ipad or iPhone. It's just so very convenient.

Love our Roku..... extremely easy to use and very reliable. Massive range of channels available, including Spotify, Pandora, Netflix etc.