Roku is the best thing out there! We got rid of cable tv and now have Roku and an antenna to pull in a few local channels. All FREE. The only cost was the initial purchase of the Roku box ($50) and the antenna ($4 at a thrift store). You will need high-speed internet and a wireless router. You will be able to get EWTN, The Catholic Channel, and loads of other channels streaming over the internet to your Roku and into your TV.
The viewing experience is a little different than cable. You can get the current news, but the news will not be streaming live, it will be a few hours old. You will get 3-minute snippets of all the news events and stories that were broadcast today on NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. If you like watching talking heads like, say, Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow you can get those shows in their entirety, but they will be yesterday’s show. So all the news type stuff is a little delayed with Roku. It isn’t right now. But if you have to have the news right now, you have the internet for that.
All the rest of the free content (and there are hundreds of channels) are mostly older tv shows (one year old and older) and older movies, documentaries and original programming. There are commercials on the free channels, but they are brief and infrequent. There are some really good tv shows that I used to enjoy, like All In The Family, Frasier and so on, and even silent movies.
All of that is free, but if you want to get more up-to-date and better programming, content that will compete with cable, you can get a subscription to Amazon Prime or Netflix, or both. Both together will cost you about $15 a month, and is well worth it. If you add to this a subscription to PlayOn, which costs $50 for a lifetime subscription, you can get a whole bunch of other great channels like the ones you get from cable such as Discovery, National Geographic, PBS, Travel Channel, HBO Go. In addition you will get YouTube and Vimeo streamed to your tv so you can watch all the content that is on those two channels, and there are lots of good movies and documentaries on those two.
All in all, the Roku, with the addition of Amazon Prime, Netflix and PlayOn, combined with an old-fashioned antenna had been worth it’s weight in gold and has been far, far, far superior to any cable tv package I have ever had. The only trouble I have had with the Roku (and it’s minor) is that you have to unplug the Roku about once a week to reset it or it will freeze up on you, just like a computer will if you never shut it down. Just unplug it for a few seconds and it will be good for another week. One other thing, in some reviews people were complaining that the Roku got hot and shut down frequently. I have never had this problem as I have purchased an older model which is covered with ventilation holes. I noticed that the newer models don’t seem to have these vents, so maybe that has made a difference. If you look at pictures, you’ll see what I mean. The newer models are taller and have rounded edges. The old ones are lower profile, and have sharp square edges and are covered with holes. If you buy a used one, make sure it has the proper connector cable for your type of tv, and has a remote.
