Re: Another Amazon deal of the day: Roku 3500R Streaming Stick (HDMI) - PRE-ORDER

On 3/6/2014 3:38 PM, David Gibbs wrote:

Roku 3500R Streaming Stick (HDMI) (2014)

What sort of investment is one looking at in order to watch the internet
on a digital TV? I used Google but the signal to noise ratio is very
low and I couldn't work out what the value-add is. As near as I can
tell, Roku.com is an aggregator which scrapes streams off of NBC.com and
NASA.gov et al and schleps the packets to the dongle which converts
packets to HDMI and Bob's your uncle.

I guess the value is that I don't have to go to NBC.com or NASA.gov or
whatever and I can use the big TV instead of the big dual monitor on my
PC.

I bet Roku's free service is about as useful as Time Warner's basic
cable TV plan, which is to say that I can watch City Council meetings
and the Shopping Channel but anything that normal people want to see is
Just A Small Additional Fee. I'll still need an ISP, so Time Warner
keeps their foot in the door; what's the typical bandwidth for this sort
of stuff?

What sort of money are we talking about, and once I've paid, do the
adverts go away?
--buck