Roku for Dummies

I’m very excited to announce the birth of a new blog.  For all that is good, bad, and ugly about America’s favorite internet streamer, click here!

Aereo: First Impressions

I have updated this post with a couple corrections.  First, Dish price included only one receiver with HD plus SD out. It would cost another $7 for the second DVR. The comparison was for my local channels in HD on TWO TVs with DVRs on each. Not a big deal, but I wanted to get the facts up here.  Second, I repeatedly stated my Fairpoint charge was $55.  It’s $45.  That reduced the cost of all options except Comcast. 

I received my invitation to try Aereo on May 27, 2013.  By this time, Aereo had already changed their pricing plan.  Instead of getting two antennas for $80 per year, I would get one antenna for $8/month or two antennas for $12 per month.  That’s about an 80% increase in price!

I DID NOT Subscribe to Dish Network Today

I cancelled the installation. When the work order arrived, it included only one receiver with HD plus SD out. It would cost another $7 for the second DVR. Not a big deal financially, but the transcript of the IM chat was clear — my local channels in HD on TWO TVs with DVRs on each. Not a big deal, but I wanted to get the facts up here.

I was putting together a review of Aereo and needed to price the competition.  After talking to Comcast ($184 + taxes and franchise fees) and DirecTV ($101 + taxes) I chatted with Dish Network.  Two DVRs and America’s Top 120 for $56.99/month ($36.99 for the first 12 months; no installation charges; HBO, Max, Sho, Starz, Blockbuster@Home for three months).  Looking at the AT120 lineup, I thought that was worth the asking price.

This is working for me right now.  There may come a day when I decide to invite Comcast, Verizon, DirecTV, Dish, or someone else into my home.  If I do, it’ll be because I find the service provided worth the fees charged.

That quote is from the Cutting The Cable page of this blog.  I wrote that four years ago.

We aren’t losing the antenna are we?

That’s what my wife asked when I told her we had subscribed to Dish.  This isn’t the end of OTA for us.  I’m just adding a box to two of my five televisions.  Dish offers channels that dovetail nicely with our OTA lineup.

What I Watch: Plex

In our home, we rely primarily on broadcast television for news and entertainment.  We use streaming boxes and servers as well.  Some content is available via multiple venues.  I want to love Plex, but I can’t.  It does a nice job presenting my media, but often applies the wrong meta data to my files.  There are a LOT of plugins, but the ones I want to work most work worst.  Hulu and Netflix are problematic.  Mostly I use Plex to stream files to TVs that have Rokus but not SMPs.  These are the channels I watch via my Plex server and why I watch them via Plex…

GetTV: Sony OTA Movie Channel

from TVNewsCheck.com…

Sony Pictures Television is jumping into the subchannel business with the digital network GetTV, which will launch this fall on Univision stations in 24 markets, including in 17 of the top 20 DMAs. It will be available in 44% of U.S. TV homes. Sony is actively selling GetTV to other station groups.

The diginet will air old movies from Sony’s library of some 3,500 films, including Lawrence of Arabiaand The Bridge on the River Kwai.

“What Sony’s announcement really means — forget about classic movies — is that networks like Me-TV, This TV, Antenna TV and GetTV are destined to have original content,” Kokernak says. “They’re all going to go original eventually. It’s just a matter of when.”

Fox Movies: OTAwesome!

This morning my DVR proudly presented a new station to me.  The screen was blank, but  pressing info and revealed this: WFXT DTV Movie Channel Coming Soon. Googling a bit, i found this…

FOX Television Stations and Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting have announced a deal to host a feature film network called Movies! on 17 of its local O&O stations beginning this spring.

Films will be edited mainly for inappropriate language or images, not run times, and be presented in the 16 x 9 format. The goal, Fox said, “is to create a new destination for movie fans that is fan friendly and available for free via over the air television, and in many cases via local cable carriage.”

The network will be available in the following markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Boston, Washington (DC), Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, Phoenix, Tampa, Minneapolis, Orlando, Austin, Memphis and Ocala (FL).  Most of these are Aereo expansion targets and Austin has Google Fiber.

According to Chicagoloand Radio and Media, Movies! Network will make its debut this coming Memorial Day (May 27th).

Aereo, at Last!

from Aereo Press Release…

Boston, Mass. (April 23, 2013) –Aereo, Inc., today announced plans to launch its groundbreaking online television technology in the Boston metropolitan area. Beginning May 15, consumers who have pre-registered with Aereo will receive a special invitation to join and be one of the first to experience Aereo’s technology. After May 30, Aereo will make membership available to all eligible consumers across the Boston designated market area (DMA), which includes more than 4.5 million consumers in 16 counties in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Boston has some of the highest cable rates in the country.  In less than a month, people from Cape Cod to Southern New Hampshire will have an inexpensive alternative.  For $80 a year plus the cost of a Roku,  cord cutters will receive 28 over-the-air broadcast channels live.  Aereo also includes a DVR function.  Interested?  Preregister here.

FireTV

Recently, a number of sources have speculated that Amazon is getting ready to unveil their own streaming media box.  No details have emerged, so this is the perfect time to fantasize about what kind of OTT experience Jeff Bezos has in store for us.  Let’s play!

Solved: Youtube on Roku (Updated 5/17/2013)

YouTube is a popular channel on OTT streamers.  Roku has never officially supported a YouTube channel, but there are a number of private channels that support it.  One of these has been removed.  The VideoBuzz channel has been ‘voluntarily’ removed from the list of Roku channels.  VideoBuzz was unique among Roku YouTube channels in that it was simple to install, easy to use, and worked.

Why did Roku VideoBuzz Roku pull the channel?  No one knows.  Roku won’t say, but the mods and VCMs on 
http://forums.roku.com
 claim that there was an IP issue…

There’s been a fair bit of speculation about VideoBuzz and the reason it is being deactivated. I want to take a moment to elaborate:

Every developer agrees to abide by the terms of the Roku developer agreement when creating a developer account. Among the requirements in the agreement, we require that every channel publisher must have the appropriate rights or permission to distribute the content within their channel through Roku. Other requirements include written authorization is required for channels with international or foreign language content. Channels that violate the developer agreement are subject to deactivation, though typically we do give them a chance to come back into compliance (or prove they are not violating it) before acting on it — we do realize that it can be a complicated world when it comes to rights for content. Sometimes we’re made aware of channels through formal notices (e.g. DMCA takedown notices or cease and desist notices) and other times we are notified more informally. Since we respect all content owners’ rights, we have to take each notification seriously and explore it for violation. Regarding VideoBuzz specifically, we don’t believe that today a Roku channel can stream from YouTube without violating YouTube’s terms of service (at least specifically section II paragraph 14 of the YouTube Developer TOS).

That’s not really true.  It can’t be.  The mods and VCMs have been promoting the use of Plex as an alternative…

Plex on Roku, out of the box, won’t receive YouTube. If the user modifies the setup to enable it, neither Plex nor Roku is at fault. They took deliberate steps to prevent YouTube on Roku through Plex, and the user subsequently took deliberate steps to enable it.

Playon also streams YouTube to a Roku (right out of the box without the user deliberately doing anything except installing server and channel) — despite the fact that mention of the channel can get you banned from the forums.

There is the issue, here is the solution…

Time to Buy a Roku?

This week, early adopters began receiving their Roku 3 streaming media players.  Already, the Roku 3 is the ‘#1 Best Seller in Multiroom Digital Music Systems’ on Amazon.com — whatever that means.  Should you buy a Roku 3?  Will a Roku 3 let you cut the cable?  In the next couple paragraphs, I’ll try to help you figure that out.

This is a blog about cutting the cable not streaming media, so any review of streaming media players has to begin with a discussion of where the media player fits into the cable cutting strategy.  Obviously, this kind of a discussion is going to be subjective — people who watch Netflix 80% of the time are going to be more excited about streaming media players than people who turn on the local news in the morning, the evening news at night, and syndicated sitcoms in between.  I fall into the latter group and am not terribly excited about streaming the internet to my television.  Just the same, I own eight streaming media players of which five are Rokus.