Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Get ready, here comes Kodak into the TV set-top box market. Due to hit stores in September, their Theatre HD Player is a Wi-Fi equipped TV set-top box that can stream music, videos, and photos from any computer that is connected to the same network right to your HDTV. It offers 720 playback, HDMI and component output ports, and a USB port.

Sounds decent, right? Sure. Until you take a look at the price tag and then compare it to what is already on the market and comparable. We have the PlayStation 3 and AppleTV. These two alone offer the exact same features and more. The Theatre HD Player will run you $300.  Now, while a 40GB PS3 is a little pricier at $400; it also has a Blu-ray player and the obvious video game console included. The AppleTV costs less than the Theatre HD at $229, and it even allows you to store media.

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Well, by now I hope you have already seen our unboxing set that we posted yesterday, but now its time for a quick hands on review with the Roku Netflix Player.

First off the player is small, which may be good or bad depending on your setup. I say this only because it does take up very little space in your entertainment stack, but similar to game consoles and the AppleTV its another odd size device that you will have to make a place for. Lucky for us, we had a nice spot to sneak it in.

The setup was easy an process and the player comes with the remote, a power adapter and a set of cables to hook it up. The setup was simple, find an empty set of plugs on your TV, plug the cables into the TV and into the player, then plug in the power adapter. Just like that its hooked up, and now its time to begin the actual setup, which I am happy to say was just as quick and painless.

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This little set-top box hit the market early last week with quite a bit of excitement. The Roku Netflix Player was what a lot of people had been waiting for, and based on statements about a 10 day delay from the Roku forums, they either sold really well or Roku had underestimated the initial sales numbers. Either way we were lucky enough to be able to get our order in early and with that ours is now in hand. That means you can be on the lookout for a review in the future, and if you have any questions about how it works send them our way. In the meantime enjoy some pics from the unboxing.

Keep reading for some more pics…

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Fresh off the official announcement we have some early reviews beginning to show up for the Netflix set-top box player from Roku. The new player will allow Netflix users with the $8.95 monthly plan (or higher) have access to (currently) 10,000 available titles for instant viewing from just about any television. While the player does have some limitations, it seems to have gotten a fairly good set of reviews, which just makes me look forward to mine arriving.

Overall it seems that most of these review were fairly similar. For the most part the comments were positive, referring to an easy initial setup and nice feature which offers automatic upgrades as they come available. The price, at $99.95 was also right on, especially considering those who are already Netflix customers will not have any additional expense, assuming they have an $8.95 a month (or higher) plan. It seems that while this may offer other devices such as they AppleTV or Vudu some competition, the lack of HD quality and current movie selection is going to hold it back. Assuming the movie selection improves over time, it could become more of a power player in the future. Other items that were mentioned was that the movie management is still done on the familiar Netflix website, you add movies to your queue the same way you always have and the box will then add them to your playlist. One potential drawback will be that the movies are streaming and with a slower connection, this could cause some issues, it was also noted in some of the reviews that because the movies were indeed streaming that it made fast-forwarding and rewinding less than ideal.

Let’s see what they had to say:

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Roku has just released the first set-top box for Netflix, allowing users to avoid the wait and have some instant access to the movie of their choosing. Unfortunately the box does not offer access to the complete Netflix library, however it still does have over 10,000 available as of now. The Roku Netflix set-top box comes in a quiet and fanless design that is about the size of just a few DVD movie cases.

The Netflix player also offers a wide variety of connectivity to include a RCA, S-video, component video, HDMI and optical audio connections. The device also offers both a wired Ethernet port as well as wireless compatibility. Any customers with a Netflix plan of $8.95 or higher will be able to get unlimited viewing of those available titles. As a service that can be used with just about any television, offers a large movie selection and costs less than $10 bucks a month, it seems that the AppleTV and Vudu have just gotten a solid competitor. The Netflix player is currently available and retailing for $99.99.

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