Mom’s Favorite Green Gadget? The Roku Box
by Francia McCormack, 07/13/10
Think gadgetry can’t be “green”? My family’s favorite home-entertainment gadget turns this stereotype on its head! In my household, the hardest working gadget is our Roku Box — or as we often call it, the Netflix box. Despite our nickname for it, we love it just as much for watching new releases, listening to music and viewing photos, too. This lightweight, compact little black box is Wi-Fi ready and streams content from the Web onto our TV with ease, entertaining my kids for hours, without DVDs, Netflix mailers or any other excess clutter.
The Roku box offers a long list of channels, but our favorite is the popular Netflix channel. For our less-than-$10 monthly Netflix membership, fee we can watch movies from our “Instant Queue” or search a library of more than 40,000 “Watch Instantly” movies, which includes thousands of children’s and family flicks. And, surprisingly this wonderful little box of entertainment is eco-friendly, too! Thanks to the Roku Box I purchase fewer DVDs, I don’t have to worry about the carbon costs of packaging and shipping traditional Netflix movies to my mailbox, and the box reduces waste and clutter in my house.
When my family wants to watch a new DVD movie release that hasn’t made it to Netflix’s Watch Instantly list yet, we tune the Roku Box to Amazon on Demand. Depending on quality – HD or standard – and the movie’s release date, I can rent a movie for $2.99 to $5.99. I can also buy movies that will stay in my Amazon.com library to watch over and over again. And a password lock protects against those sneaky little ones who may try to “accidentally” buy Alvin and the Chipmunks.
For music, we love Roku’s Pandora Radio channel. Because the company has an agreement with Pandora, the station plays ad free from the Roku box — a feature usually only offered with a Pandora subscription. Since Pandora has such a wide variety of music available, there’s something suited to everyone in the family. We all have our favorite stations and the remote is so easy to use, even my 4 year old daughter can control it. When it’s music time, she can find her favorite song Ants Wear Underpants, or when its movie time, she can start Scooby Doo.
MediaFly, Flickr and Facebook also have channels and Roku’s list keeps on growing. Now at family gatherings, we share our photos by streaming online albums to the TV. The Roku is an amazing little box and green moms and dads will especially appreciate that with the Roku, they can stop spending so much money on little plastic cases that hold rarely-watched movies that do little more than fill up our cabinets.
What is your family’s favorite gadget?
Let us know in the comments below!
This series has been presented by Best Buy Movie Mode. The mobile app that translates the Minions during the 3-D theatrical end credits of Despicable Me. It’s a must have for Despicable Me movie goers, check it out here!
Our iPhones! At home or on the go there’s always a new app available to download to entertain kids and adults.
Mine is my Playstation – it plays Netflix movies on demand and you can even just surf the internet on your TV.
Cheers for the Roku! Way to streamline!
I swear by my xbox 360 when my younger cousins visit. It keeps them happy and me sane.
Well, this sounds pretty cool. We merged out all our DVD cases – too much stuff and clutter and put them in one disc folder, but really, if I could have movies saved on a platform of some kind that would be really waste free. I might be worried that the machine would break though, thus making getting movies back a pain.
Our little $99 investment in our Roku device continues to pay dividends over a year later – as new channels and features have been seamlessly added (via automatic download), we’ve gotten access to Pandora, Picasa, Facebook, and a lot of other things — some weird, some wonderful. I love the fact that it is wireless and really really idiot-proof. That simplicity and the fact that it is truly wireless is what differentiates Roku from its many competitors.
One of the first things I did was to use my ION device to convert our entire library of moldering VHS tapes to files, then upload these files to a service called Motionbox, which (naturally) is available through Roku for streaming. Same goes for all those seldom watched DVDs – ripped and uploaded, done. Unfortunately, it now appears that Motionbox has been acquired by HP and is being shut down so I am currently scrambling to find a new home for all my files but I have confidence a solution will be found.
Our home entertainment center is the envy of our neighbors and it is so tiny, so inexpensive, so clean and sleek and elegant. The next step, a big one, will be to cut the ‘cable’. I need to find a way to get rid of Comcast/Dish/DirecTV. We don’t watch much conventional television to begin with, but I do love “Mad Men” on AMC. But paying $90 per month for 500 channels of mostly unwatchable garbage is not part of our goal.
I am watching the development of GoogleTV with some interest – if it were to be combined with a hardware device like Roku, I believe it will allow me to cut that cable…
The Roku is awesome! It’s so cool to see it getting some press. I love Netflix too, but I think my favorite channel is the old ‘Kung-fu’ movies channel – its like 2 bucks a month, and my fiancee and I have started a wednesday night tradition of watching an old school kung fu movie and eating stir-fry The best way to break up a week!
My favorite gadget remains to be my iPhone. I especially love apps that make my life as a working mom considerably easier! By the way, if it’s alright, I’d like to recommend one of my current favorite apps, Intuition. Tagged as mom’s personal assistant, it’s a task management app that has many features designed to help us moms. It’s really easy to use and it looks cute, too. Plus, it’s free!