what has worked well for you guys, with regards to streaming video?
I have a Roku, a smart DVD player and now a smart TV.
I can't give up the DVD because to me, Netflix is like looking at a refrigerator full of food but you there is nothing you want to eat.
Peronally, I think the best combination is Roku and a cheap DVD Blu-Ray.
My Sony Blu-Ray also has 2 usb ports and I can plug an external hard drive into it, or a thumb drive that has movies on it, pictures, whatever and view them thru the dvd player on the TV.
The down side to all of these streaming devices is live TV- especially sports. If you want to be a cord cutter, you'll give up a good chunk of live TV (news and sports mainly)
I finally got around to try streaming TV and have an Amazon Fire TV stick and one Roku stick, both stream NetFlex Video with zero issues. I have Verizon FIOS speeds are around 24 down / 14 up and can stream shows on two TV's at once. If I had more than two TV on it I would bump it to 50/50.
Of the two I think the Roku is a little easier to use at least my wife likes it more and the Roku comes with more easy to add items like PBS, Nat GEO, History channel, etc.
I know can hack hack the Fire Stick to get free bootleg movies but I really do not have the time to bother.
I have a box with XBMC on it (the hack for the Fire Stick)
You have to really want to watch a bootleg movie to enjoy it. Streaming works about 50% of the time and the quality for "new" movies sucks.
I did it for a few days for the novelty of it and now I don't even think about it.
I have done without cable/satellite for almost three years now. I don't watch much in the way of sports, and could care less for most cable programming.
My wife likes some of the older shows, and it looks like with Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus and Netflix, she will get about anything she has an interest in.
The FiberOptic network in the condo is giving me 49 MBPS down, and about half that up, so I think the speed is ok.
I bought a Roku 3 a few months ago and like it just fine, so much so that I've cancelled cable TV. Was paying over $50 per month for basic cable and found myself surfing endlessly through commercials - not why I paid for cable in the first place.
Mostly watch Netflix for TV shows and some movies but was a bit disappointed at the movies offered. Lots and lots of B grade movies or if they are A list movies they are a couple of years old at least. But for $7.99/month I can't bitch too much, I was paying more than that to rent three DVD's at Hastings. Haven't taken the plunge for some other services but as you note it looks like one could sign up for Amazon Prime, Hulu or a couple of others and have pretty much all you want to see and still pay a lot less per month than cable.
Now that I have streaming TV I can't imagine watching it any other way. Watch just what you want to watch when you want to watch it with no commercials. Love to run through all seasons of an older TV show one after the other, or just stop a movie in mid-stream and start again in an hour or a day.
went with the ROKU 3. Spent the day hooking it up. Already had accounts for Netflix, Hulu +, HBOGO and Amazon.
Figuring how to activate those on the RUKU was a pain, but I finally got it all done.
So far, it seems to work just fine.
I hooked it all up to the new Samsung TV my wife won last month in a drawing. What a nice set up.
All this stuff is for those who have unlimited internet service, and fast internet service. Some don't have that luxury.
a good point Wayne. Here in Miami, the new fiber optic stuff makes all this possible. Up in my North Florida home, the DSL is really too slow for streaming to be entirely satisfactory