Netflix Roku Box Channel Store: Functionality Welcome, But Usability Suffers
About a week ago Neflix rolled out an update to the Roku Digital Video Player, and as a big fan of the device I put it through its paces.
The Good
- Adding more channels fulfills the promise of more content coming from just Netflix, Amazon video rentals, and major league baseball. My personal favorite is Pandora, but there’s also flickr and Facebook for photographs, video podcasts (MediaFly, Revision3, Twit.tv, Blip.tv), home videos from motionbox, news snippets like stocks and weather served up by FrameChannel, and an “online community” organizer by the name of MobileTribe.
- With the addition of podcasts and flickr, within striking distance of Apple TV functionality. Still missing YouTube and media extender ability (play content from a computer on the same network).
The Bad
- Setting up each individual channel is a tedious process. After adding a channel, a code and a URL appears on your television. You then have to visit the partner website in that URL and enter the code. But each website wants you to sign up for a new account with them, meaning a particular form to fill out, resulting in yet-another-login-and-pass. Doing this for one site is no big deal, but several meant I gave up after four.
- Usability suffers. One big reason why I love the Roku Digital Video Player is its simplicity. But each new channel presents a new puzzle in terms of figuring out how things work, including the associated website. I marked several podcasts as favorite to have them appear at top rather than buried several levels down, but my video channel doesn’t appear. Pandora has “channels” but I don’t know where those musical choices came from; again, website fiddling seems necessary. I couldn’t figure out how to add just the Dow Jones and NASDAQ as items to track in FrameChannel.
Conclusion
The welcome addition of new channels to the Roku Digital Video Player brings it closer to the Apple TV in theory, but in practice, because of the added complexity, I’ll likely continue watching video podcasts via the Apple TV, simply because they’re accessible from the top menu. So while I’m enjoying Pandora and MediaFly, the loss of usability leaves me feeling a little disappointed — not to mention confused.