With the recent inclusion of the Amazon Video on Demand service, and the talk about more services being available this year, this slim black box has gotten a little more indispensable and pulls the curtain back to reveal what life will be like after the cable and satellite companies pass fully into obsolescence.

The Netflix Player (now being re-branded as Digital Video Player to highlight its flexibility) is priced very competitively at $99 USD when compared to the other devices like Vudu and Blockbuster’s OnDemand which really kill their value proposition by charging per rental, the all-you-can-eat model of Netflix encourages you to explore and watch things that you might not normally or to re-watch shows like we do with our daughter–Word World at $1.99, 3 times daily, 7 days a week can add up quickly. Now, Amazon VOD is positioned in a similar way as Vudu and Blockbuster so we really haven’t dipped our toes into their waters just because the idea of “buying” movies that are “stored” on their servers leaves us a little uneasy because that purchase is more like a “lifetime” lease for their service goes away your purchase goes with it. Subscriptions just “feel” like more bang for my buck, I suppose.

Arguments aside for rental or subscription, the Netflix Player is fantastic. It is stupid-simple to set up from hooking it up to your TV, updating the firmware, and authorizing it with Netflix and Amazon. In our case, we hooked it up to a 10 year old 19″ TV in our bedroom and it looks and performs great with no lag in playback and a clear crisp picture.

The Netflix experience is much better than we had anticipated with the movies in our queue browsed in a coverflow-like implementation and while that might sound clunky we can easily flip through the some 250 items in our queue with little to no problem. What we would like to see, though, is the ability to make shelves for those titles so that we can quickly scan by genre, keyword, or even alphabetically. Once you find a movie selecting it brings you to a synopsis and the ability to play it either from where you left off or at the beginning and if it is a TV show you can select which episode to watch. On our DSL connection (6 Mbps/768 Kbps) buffering the movie takes a little under a minute but after that there are no hiccups and the picture does not have the same type of blocky pixelation that we often find on our Mac Mini using Silverlight.

What has us excited though are the mysterious 10 new services to make an appearance by years end. Management and I have been speculating about what services are next to come and while YouTube is likely we would love to see Hulu make an appearance. The recent kerfuffle with Boxee could be an argument for or against, one can never tell when it comes to entertainment executives and their whims but Hulu on the Roku would be a coup for Internet delivered entertainment. The more services available to the Roku the better as it might spur more companies to open up to more platforms and let their gardens grow over the walls.

Pros

• Small set-top box
• Comfortable remote
• Easy set-up
• Responsive navigation
• Hiccup free viewing

Cons***

• No search
• No finding movies outside of queue
• No sorting by genre or title

Bottom-Line: $99 + $9/month at Netflix is money well spent.

*** This are more cons regarding the implementation of the Netflix service as we really have not felt compelled to explore Amazon’s due to the cost of à la carte viewing.