Hacker News Reader

Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

For all it's faults, Hulu Plus is pretty great. $8/month for around 80% of what you want. I'll buy the rest from iTunes on a seasonal basis. I hate the ads. I hate that some shows aren't all there or there at all. But it's the best way to watch current TV legally on demand at a reasonable price. Combined with Netflix, it's enough to cord-cut.

Apple TV can be awesome if they allow app developers to create apps for it. As it stands, the Netflix + Hulu Plus combo is nice but Roku has had that forever. Roku also has HBOGO, Amazon Instant Video, Dish World, a few news channels, live sports and more.

The nice integration between OSX, iOS and Apple TV is not enough reason to jump to Apple TV just yet but I'd switch in a heart beat if/when they add App Store to it.

View on HN

While I agree with all this, there is one thing Apple TV has that makes it a must buy in my case... and that is Airplay. Whatever slack it has now, I can simply make up for by screen mirroring (ie. use Amazon Instant Video) from my Macbook Air using ML Airplay.

The nice integration between OSX, iOS and Apple TV is not enough reason to jump to Apple TV just yet but I'd switch in a heart beat if/when they add App Store to it.

What's crazy to me is that Google develops the Nexus Q, and then makes the terrible decision not to allow you to run apps on it. It obviously is technically capable, as seen by the various mods people are doing to it. But for the price they are asking, I want access to more than just Google's inferior media offerings.

I agree on the app store. We cut the netflix subscription for Amazon Instant Video (the wife and I just don't watch enough videos in a month for $8/month), and the lack of that app makes Apple TV basically just a better way of screen sharing photos. Which is no mean feat, as I've been defeated trying to get the resolution perfect every time I've tried to hook up my Air to a TV via HDMI and use iPhoto.

I have a Roku and an AppleTV and the latter gets a lot more use because of one feature above all - Airplay (and the Netflix UI on AppleTV is way better than the Roku).

I like the variety available on Roku, but the painfully slow UI has me ready to walk away.

Completely agree. It feels very clunky. Apple TV with it's responsive UI does smoke the experience on Roku. However, content is king.

I feel the same way about Boxee.

The Boxee netflix app is painful to use. It's so much faster to load up Netflix on the iPad and then use Airplay to stream to the Boxee.

plus the missing Youtube channel on Roku makes me want to buy Apple TV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com