Roku Premiere and video on demand
Some history and thoughts on the streaming/content eco-system as I get Apple TV+ and Disney+ in full 4K glory! And a mini-review of sorts of the Roku Premiere. This week I purchased a Roku Premiere player. The Roku system has an interesting history. It started out as a Netflix project , and is now one of the widely supported platforms. Other content providers like Sky have even re-badged them for their streaming set top boxes. Building infrastructure It feels like we are entering a new phase of the on-demand television journey. There are two aspects that are required for digital delivery - processing power and network capacity. I remember upgrading my old 486 PC in 1996 to a Cyrix 5x86 - and for the first time had something that could decode and play MPEG movies with respectable quality. Of course dial up internet at that time was painfully slow! So everything had to be delivered physically. Not long after WebTV appeared, but even with Microsoft buying it and re-branding as MSN TV...