when ever I’m going some where and want to share things from my laptop without having to be tied to the TV.
Keep in mind, you’ll have to hack it to play video files off your laptop and I’ve heard the quality is bad even when you do that.
Airport Extreme
That’s your first mistake. AFAIK and have experienced, Apple makes buggy and overpriced routers. I wonder if you’d had a very different experience with a better router?
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I also think I read somewhere that Netflix downgrades streaming quality in browsers but not on standalone devices or apps,
Wow, if that’s the case, Netflix is simply asking people to pirate instead of dealing with the limitations and hassle.
“But Roku’s great menu of 800-plus channels exclude the single biggest video site, YouTube.”
Huh? Roku has a YouTube channel.
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I believe you’re right. It’s a truth I have not been wanting to face since I’m the sucker that paid over $100 for a piece of shit router. 
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For a lot of people–maybe not so much the BB demographic!–“making a TV a computer” is a scary prospect. To me, it merely sounds like more work.
I do like the EyeTV, or at least I did when I tried it about four years ago; it offered some TiVo-esque simplicity without the monthly TiVo tax. But many U.S. viewers don’t have sufficiently reliable DTV reception for that to be a viable option.
Hotel TVs would be tricky. Most hotel WiFi authentication happens through a “captive portal,” where you have to enter a code or click an “OK” button on a Web page–and the Chromecast can’t handle those logins. (Neither can Apple TV or Roku.)
Hotel TVs can be wonky even without that issue. I did some testing of the Roku and Chromecast with one rather nice example earlier this week, and the set kept on switching the input away from the HDMI port to show its usual reel of trailers for VOD titles.
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My brother’s been using Plex with his Roku 3 (I think) for the past six months or so and says it works well with his way-too-extensive music library.
It does not today. There have been workarounds with private channels, but Roku has made a habit of shutting them down.
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It does? I’ve been unable to find it. My friends at google say that Roku will not pay for it, and so its not there.
Completely official.
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I disagree. I used an old Airport base station to add wireless to our old wired router and it was dependable as a donkey. Now the ISP has given us a WiFi router which we use instead. It often suffers from interference with other WiFi networks. I’ve had our ISP help verify network slowdown problems several times, and each time we tested and proved it was the local WiFi network that was crawling, not the internet connection. So I manually change channels and constantly check it whenever there’s a slowdown. My peers with more IT experience tell me this is normal. It seems the Airport router was smart enough to switch channels when there was interference and the cheap ISP WiFi router isn’t. I still have the Airport router but the problem never gets quite bad enough to justify the hassle of adding the 2nd router to the network - or figuring out how to replace the ISP router.
That’s very true about users. And I think the EU began digital TV sooner (SD), so the service is perhaps more established. And it’s likely more expensive.
Plus, visitors to our house don’t know how to use our TV. Granted, when I go to anyone else’s house, we don’t know how to use their TV either. They will routinely have a proper, badly set up, giant, high scan rate TV that makes Bladerunner look like it was shot on an iPhone, and an array of boxes, each with their own 175 button remote and a user interface that looks like it was designed by the NSA. (Did you see the ‘graphic design’ on the XKeyscore presentation or UI? Geezes, talk about totalitarian kitsch 
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Most what I’m looking to share of my laptop is picture and websites so it not much of a problem. As far as media goes I’m mainly using Netflix and Youtube while traveling so that’s not a problem for me.
Interesting. Could you just use it with a with a smart phone set up as a mobile hotspot?
Huh, I must have added a private channel. I know I added a few, but I don’t remember which ones they are. Been using it for a long time.
Correction FYI: We changed “The latter’s navigational buttons have the ‘select’ button below them, not in the middle where you’d expect it” to “On many Roku models, the remote’s navigational buttons have the “select” button below them, not in the middle where you’d expect it.” I missed this because I checked the description of the Roku 3 remote to confirm that it still had this problem, but then I didn’t see how they’d changed this on remotes now shipped with older models (which is kind of a crazy product-update strategy, but whatever); a friend noted that the photo in the piece contradicted my description.
If the phone gets enough bandwidth for video, absolutely.
I tried to find a link supporting my claim, but could not so I’m not sure why I think that. I notice the quality difference myself, but some people blame that on PC implementation rather than a specific desire by Netflix to downgrade your quality on different devices. That said, I know that Amazon only sends HD streaming to devices like the Xbox and won’t let you see the same quality in a browser, so maybe I just assumed Netflix did that as well.
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I ran off and bought a ChromeCast within fifteen minutes of seeing the announcement. What I didn’t know was that Amazon throws in four months of Netflix for free, bringing the effective price of the device under five bucks for people already spending money on Netflix.
I can’t freaking wait for mine to show up.
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