As most who know me, know that I am a huge movie watcher, I have found in my later years that getting time to watch movies just isn’t what it use to be. What with work, the wife, the dog, and school, it’s been a pretty full plate. Which is why On-Demand from Comcast has been such a huge thing for me as it has allowed me to watch shows and movies whenever I want, pause it, and come back to it, so it’s really the best of all the worlds!

But that just isn’t good enough these days. Why you may ask, well for one thing, it Comcast doesn’t have that great of a movie collection! Also we have Encore On-Demand, also without a great movie selection. In addition to the selection, I’m also referring to Comcast’s ability to keep updating the movies so that there will be shows on there that I actually want to see.

In addition to Comcast, we have Netflix, which has been a huge life saver. No only do we get 3 movies at a time (which I have found to be just plenty!), but we also can rent both DVD and BluRay disks depending on the movie and how much we want to enjoy it.

So this has been my life, Comcast on-Demand, and Netflix hard copy movies. But again, just not good enough. One of the bad things with Netflix is that you have to wait for the DVD’s. Be it there usually is only a 2-3 day turn around which really isn’t that bad, sometimes when you want to watch a movie, you want to watch it NOW! Yes we really do live in a world of instant gratification!

To appeal to this need for instant gratification, awhile back Netflix introducted movies-on-demand, which is a watch instantly feature. So you load up Netflix in your trusty IE (sorry no Firefox at this juncture without the IE tab component) install the player, and you can watch from some 10,000 online movies right on your computer. So you say what’s the downside! Well have you ever tried to watch a movie on your computer? Even if you have a HD LCD screen and it’s bigger than 20 inches, and you have a killer 5.1 or 7.1 speaker configuration with a HD sound card, blah blah blah, it just isn’t the same as watching it on a 50 inch plasma, with Bose surround sound, etc etc.

To address this Netflix partnered with a company and produced the Roku. Now the name is weird, but what it does is hardly weird. It’s a little box that is no bigger than your surfboard cable modem, that plugs into your home entertainment center via component, stero, or HDMI configurations, and allows you to connect your watch instantly queue in Netflix directly to your entertainment system. NOW STAND BACK! This thing is AWESOME! If there ever was a better way for you to spend $100, this is it. I’ve spent the past two weekends, just watching Roku, and I couldn’t be happier. You can get shows that you can’t get on-demand, such as Seaquest or Sliders, and you can watch them at your leasure. The Roku allows for wireless and wired connections, and believe me, over 802.11g, its really not bad at all! There is a bit of graininess, so if you are a videophile, go and plug it into your Gigabit network and quite down!