Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We recently bought a Roku XD box (right before Roku 2 came out) and we absolutely love it. Hundreds of free channels from all over the world. Buy Roku once, and -- as long as you have a TV (even an old one, like ours) and an Internet connection -- you have free television shows and movies... lots of them. See, absolutely anyone can create a channel for Roku and -- as long as they have hosting to meet bandwidth demands -- they can place the channel on Roku, free. (Assuming it meets Roku's quality standards, of course.) As a result, there are all kinds of great niche channels created by enthusiasts for things like surfing, rock climbing, old-time drive-in movies, etc. Lately, we've seen a lot of Christian programming added, which makes Roku attractive for many people who want more faith-friendly programs. Menorah TV is also on Roku. And, BYU-TV just added their channel, which means we can see "Dogs with Jobs" every evening... among other cool shows, like genealogy shows, history programs, and sports. More recreational and fitness programming is arriving, and there are so many (mostly English) channels from Asian countries, they have their own category among the hundreds of Roku channels. I love watching France24 news and other international news shows, live (and in English). My weather channel is now Roku's feed from Weather Underground... so it's for my exact town instead of the nearest city, complete with fresh-every-five-minutes satellite and radar images. Though it's only part of what we watch, we have Netflix on our Roku programming. It costs the same as Netflix does on your computer (if you already have Netflix service, you don't pay anything extra), and you can also add things like Hulu Plus and Amazon's streaming programming. But, except for Netflix, everything else we watch is free. That means, after buying the Roku box (less than a month's cable TV bill), we pay nothing extra for our TV service. It's saving us over $100/month in cable TV bills, with far better programming and crisper images. Most channels have little or no commercial interruptions, too. Almost all of them are on-demand, as well. We can also access things like Picasa, Pandora, and Facebook via Roku. Lots of options! The only negative to this -- and we hope this is short-term -- is that there's no closed captioning. (However, the hundreds of anime features on Crackle have subtitles... and that programming is free.) I'm pretty sure the channels and Roku are working on this. All in all, I have no idea how cable TV will compete with things like Roku. Between the price (free) and the range of great programs we can watch, we will never go back to cable TV. Roku + an Internet connection + a TV (even an old one) = free TV!