My pick for this year’s consumer entertainment breakthrough product is the Roku, the small black box that’s been seriously dictating what I watch on my TV these past few months. For you market-research folks out there, I’m a cable subscriber (the horrid company, yes), also a Netflix subscriber and have a good selection of DVDs. I also own a PS3 which I use primarily to play Blu-Ray movies, and games every once in a while. I was quite happy with this setup till I found the Roku - which so far is slowly replacing all of these channels and devices thanks to its ease-of-use and high availability.
Earlier attempts at integrating websites and downloaded content to my TV included hooking up my Mac to the PS3 using MediaLink, and also more than a few frustrating and unmaintainable PC-to-TV setups. The problem usually turns out to be is that I have a short period of time to do these home-integration setups, after which I’d like them to be on auto-pilot so that during the one hour of my day (sometimes two) that I watch something with my fiancée, it’ll be something that we already have expressed an interest in. What usually happened was that either the integrations failed too often, or required me to invest more time into acquiring the content that I liked. Not fun.
Enter my new best friend - Roku box. Right now, its capabilities are limited; it has a variety of uninteresting channels/plugins (with the promise of more to come soon) and two ones that matter - Netflix and Amazon On-Demand. As of now, these two channels have enough interesting content that we’re seriously considering disconnecting our cable and going on-demand the whole way. Buying DVDs are on the way out too. I’d rather buy single episodes of TV shows one at a time than shell out the big bucks for cable that I never watch, movies too.
Okay, so this is all great - Roku is helping me out, on-demand video is great and all - but we still have a problem: there’s a lot of content around that’s still locked up within the traditional media delivery channels. Here’s what I’d really like to see, and something I feel would really take off: a subscription framework for general video content that will allow me to pay for whole seasons of content, with episodes automatically downloaded/accessible on a weekly schedule. Even better, send me an email whenever content that I might be interested in is available - take my viewing stats, what do I care? I already give up a lot of info to Netflix anyway.
There are many problems with this approach that are clearly apparent, mostly involving licensing and the general willingness of media outlets to even consider this kind of programming. Roku’s doing this to some extent already, but it kind of seems like their efforts are more towards providing an open SDK for providers to program against. Just one company/startup that’ll bring all of the big media outlets to the table to talk about the future - I think Amazon would be the one who can really pull this off. Thoughts?