Roku 2 Streaming Player – A New Way To Watch TV

I will admit that I’m a little technology unsavvy when it comes to wireless networks and streaming on my TV. We use DirecTV since my husband is a football nut, and he loves their NFL package so we can watch our team, The Detroit Lions, every week. But I was excited at the prospect of being able to stream shows on my TV by using the Roku 2.

The Roku 2 is a streaming player that is really small. It can fit the palm of my hand! It easily hooked up to our TV and then hooked to the internet. Because we aren’t very good with the wireless networks, my husband just hooked it up to our router via a USB cord. Once we got it hooked up, we were able to look at all the channels that they have to stream.

There are hundreds of channels that you can use to watch programs. Many of these are free though some do cost some money. And others, like the Netflix and Hulu Plus channels, were free to add to Roku but you can’t do anything with them without a subscription to Netflix or Hulu Plus. But my husband was really excited when he found one particular free channel, Crunchyroll.

Crunchyroll is a free channel that has full length Japanese anime series. My husband got more excited as we looked through the titles because there were several series that he had wanted to see. We looked around some more and decided that to get the most out of the Roku 2 player, we should either get Netflix or Hulu Plus.

We picked Netflix, even knowing some of the issues that Netflix has been going through, just because they had a one month free trial compared to Hulu Plus who only had a one week free trial. Since we aren’t going to get rid of our DirecTV, we were okay with the lack of some popular shows on Netflix. So far, I’ve been thrilled with our choice because of the amount of content that Netflix has to stream.

Roku 2 isn’t just for TV shows and movies though. There is a Pandora channel so you can listen to music, a Flickr channel so you can show off pictures on your TV that are in your Flickr account, as well as games. Many of the games cost money but the player we got came with Angry Birds for free. My daughter has been really into Angry Birds since she actually can play it and win the levels so she was really excited to see her Birds on the big TV. My husband was the one who played it, and he said the controls took a little getting used to but it was still fun to play.

If my husband didn’t want to watch sports, I think we would seriously think about dropping our DirecTV and just use the Roku 2. I would recommend it to anyone who likes to have a lot of content to watch and listen to as well as wanting an alternative to cable or satellite TV.

Note: I received a copy of this streaming player  for review purposes.