There are a couple things about these boxes (Roku, AppleTV, etc) that bother me.
1: You cannot record streaming video with any of them. This means you're stuck watching ads. Ads waste a lot of time. Ad skipping was available way, way back when Sony introduced the betamax.
2: You can't record streaming video, meaning you cannot keep a copy of anything locally. Many of the providers limit the time any given video is available. Movies "expire," TV shows "expire" and you can't watch it again unless you pay for it.
...
Regardless, as long as we can't record and can't skip ads, I see these streaming services as a big step backwards.
I understand this in theory, but in practice my experience with streaming services is much different than you might expect. I gave up cable TV a while back, switching entirely to Netflix and Hulu streaming on the AppleTV. I never had Tivo or a DVR, I just had "cable" (aka 200 channels, 5 of which you actually like). I'm paying Netflix and Hulu a
tiny fraction of what I was paying the cable company, and really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Netflix doesn't have ads and Hulu Plus has no ads except for a couple of shows (people who get all upset about "Hulu Plus costs money
AND HAS ADS!!1!" are unfamiliar with it in practice, or are looking for something to be outraged by - the only ads I've ever seen on Hulu were on
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and it was
one ad at the beginning, and
one ad at the end of each episode, both pretty short and non-screaming - big deal - some shows have contracts that Hulu can't get around). So, in practice?
Ads are basically non-existent to me. Oh, I tend to watch the daily news broadcast on the ReutersTV app every day (you pick 10, 15, or 30 minutes and it gives you the top N stories that fit in that time, well reported by actual journalists vs. the anything-for-ratings "news" you get on TV these days), and that program tends to have two embedded non-screaming ads of perhaps 20 seconds each, so they get me for a whole 2/3rds of a minute a day there. It's a reasonable trade for the news update provided.
So that's under a minute of ads a day, and the rest of the time I don't have to put any effort into riding the fast forward/etc to skip ads, I just watch the shows. You likely end up seeing more ads than I do, each day, just because of the inevitable small miscalculations in trying to skip over them all - for me they're not there in the first place.
As well, some of the best "TV" these days is
only on streaming:
House of Cards and
Orange is the New Black are absolutely two of the best series I've watched in the last five years - they're seriously HBO-good - and they're only on Netflix. Amazon and Hulu are doing some groundbreaking new work as well, I think. If you stick with just cable TV, you're missing out on some really fabulous content. Oh, and no ads there, either.
Yes, some things do go away eventually, but I don't want to watch every show/movie all the time. And if I want to watch something
right now and it's not on, I can buy it or rent it. And keep in mind I can buy or rent a
LOT of things every month and still end up paying
way less overall (Netflix + Hulu + rentals) than I was paying for cable. And I don't have to worry about physical or disk-based storage space - no managing shelves of DVDs, no juggling Tivo/DVR contents, deciding what to sacrifice to make room for something that starts in five minutes.
And if you do happen to have an existing large collection of video content on your home network, just download and fire up the Plex or Infuse apps and the AppleTV becomes a great front-end for watching that content.
There are people who take this route (cut the cord and stream with an AppleTV, Roku, FireTV, etc.) and find a few shows they really want to stay current on even though they aren't available (or aren't entirely available) from Netflix/Hulu, so they buy a "season pass" for the show from iTunes (in the AppleTV case), and get the episodes as they come out. I did something like that last year when I got hooked on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and wanted to binge-watch all the back episodes and there was a season's worth that wasn't available otherwise - bought a season pass for the missing season and satisfied my craving - still came out
way ahead of my old cable bill that month.
And, again, I'm watching less than a minute of ads per day. I can live with that.
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The Rokus are my go to device for my streaming (Amazon Prime when, Apple?) and the ATV has become my new niche device when I need it (like when I want to AirPlay my niece's soccer games using my iPad Pro or MacBook Pro).
The Rokus are (at least mostly) good devices, though my preference is for the ATV4. But as to Amazon Prime, don't ask Apple about it, direct your ire at Amazon. I'm annoyed by this. I'm paying Amazon for Prime, which includes their Amazon Prime Video. Amazon will stream video to my iOS-based iPhone and iPad using their existing iOS app, but Amazon refuses to tweak that app to run on the iOS-based AppleTV4, and they also refuse to sell,
or allow any 3rd-party Amazon Marketplace dealer sell, the Apple TV, because that might "confuse" buyers. Uh huh. I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with Amazon wanting to make an easier place to sell their FireTV. And they call Apple a "walled garden".
TV3) but we all just waited for about a year to get a switch from white background to black and features like single sign in. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for some very simple features of
