Got me a Roku box

Someone at work got this for free with the last TV they bought. As they're not a Netflix customer they were happy to offload it on me for $50, and I was happy to get it for half price.

I've been a big fan of the Netflix streaming since they first started - though I'm less pleased with the quality since they switched over to Silverlight. Up until now, I've had to plug the laptop into the TV if I wanted to watch streaming videos in comfort. Now I have a dedicated box under the TV so I can tune into Netflix more easily whenever I want.

It's also nice that the Roku box supports MediaFly, so I can get to any of my podcasts and play them through the TV too. I've had some issues with video streaming for some podcasts (not all) but audio streaming works great (BBC Newspod, KQED, etc.). I suspect the issue is really to do with my low bandwidth DSL internet connection. I don't think the Roku has much in the way of buffering.

My only disappointment is the lack of Youtube streaming. I've found rather a lot of good content on YouTube these past 12 months, while testing my Palm Pre's streaming capability, so I'd like to have access to all the channels I've subscribed to through YouTube (ITN news, Diggnation, Makezine, infoMedia, ...).

Roku on Amazon.com