Netflix announces $100 set top box

by billso on Tuesday, 20 May 2008

I pre­dicted this in my 29 April 2008 billso.com arti­cle: Net­flix is unveil­ing a $100 set-top box today. The device is a 5-inch square box that hooks into a broad­band Inter­net con­nec­tion and streams movies from Net­flix. A 1 mbps con­nec­tion seems ade­quate, although HD movies may require more pipe.

Cus­tomers won’t need a com­puter to man­age their Net­flix account or view movies, as the box also con­nects to TVs and home the­ater com­po­nents via com­po­nent TV cables and HDMI.

Roku is one man­u­fac­turer that was already been revealed in the AP arti­cle. We already knew about LG. Oth­ers are com­ing. Read the AP story for more details. Reviews from Wired and Cnet, along with pic­tures of this rather ordi­nary look­ing black box, are avail­able from this brief Engad­get arti­cle.

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Tagged as: broadband, Internet, netlfix, television, video

  • http://dpeters1.myopenid.com/ Daniel Peters

    Net­flix seems to have a huge user base, so I wouldn’t be sur­prised if this thing actu­ally takes off. I was imme­di­ately put off by the fact that this wont do hi-def but then I real­ized I’m prob­a­bly not in the tar­get demo­graphic for this sort of thing.

    Net­flix already has some direct stream­ing avail­able online, this sim­ply removes the need for a com­puter in the equa­tion and will do well with peo­ple that don’t have a com­puter already hooked up to their tv. Again, I’m not part of that demographic.

    I won­der if they’ll really have the band­width to pump this stuff out. My friend uses the online stream­ing the offer and per­for­mance is far from steller, albeit some­what ade­quate overall.

    An inter­est­ing aspect of this stream­ing video ser­vice is the Net­flix Media Cen­ter exten­der men­tioned in a link on the engad­get arti­cle. This could remove the need for Xbox360 (and media cen­ter com­puter users) to pur­chase the box alto­gether. Bad news for Roku, but good news for Net­flix if a coun­try full of xbox users sud­denly want eas­ily streamed full length movies for a low monthly price.

    I’m almost tempted to think that piracy is still easy enough to con­tend with this, but stream­ing video is such a swift deliv­ery method and per­fect in a soci­ety that craves instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. If Net­flix finds a way to get Youtube and maybe some inter­net radio on this set top box but doesn’t fall into the trap of try­ing to make a “TV Com­puter,” this stream­ing con­tent deliv­ery ser­vice thing could really catch on.

  • http://billso.com billso

    A media-centric Net­flix box makes lots of sense. Adding ‘fea­tures’ like web brow­ing and email would only cause sup­port prob­lems. The Roku box sounds like a lean, mean media server that is bonded to Net­flix services.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Kevin Kelly sent out a review of the Roku net­flix box for his newslet­ter sub­scribers. There’s a long excerpt in this arti­cle called Roku: $100 gad­get for watch­ing Net­flix movies on your TV.

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