Netflix and Roku hope to avoid the curse of the set-top box
Jackson West · 05/20/08 02:40PMWhat makes Netflix's new living-room box for Internet video downloads different from all the other set-top flops? Everything. The price is low: At $99, it's much cheaper than the $229 Apple TV. It connects to regular TVs as well as HDTVs, and can stream video in variable quality depending on your Internet connection speed. And you can eat all you want from the buffet of available titles on Netflix, with movies available online that happen to be in your Netflix queue already lined up and ready to go. Hardware partner Roku has introduced it with a chipset that other manufacturers can license, and Netflix has a huge domestic subscriber base as potential customers. So what three things could doom this product to the same fate as every other Internet-video set-top?