Apple Television Vs. Google tv Vs. Roku: 3

With the deluge of flixy streaming stick and downloadable video choices the Internet has to supply, it’s change into apparent that laptop and iPod screens can’t hold a candle to the wall-dimension HD monster in your living room. To plug this hole, a burgeoning market of streaming set-high bins has cropped up. Google just lately made a effectively-publicized entrance into this market, while Apple and an up-and-coming company referred to as Roku have been lighting up TVs for a few years now. For this evaluate, I looked at three offerings: the just lately updated Apple Tv ($99), Roku’s like-priced XD|S model, and the first Google Tv providing from Logitech, the $299 Revue. All these bins faucet into your Wi-Fi community or wired Ethernet to stream Net-based mostly video and radio services to your Flixy TV Stick. All of them use the HDMI interface, though Roku additionally offers composite and RCA jacks for older TVs or video projectors. And they all present access to a mixture of free and price-based video sources.

To a certain extent, these gadgets duplicate companies you may have already got. Your cable firm offers on-demand exhibits and film rentals, and a few Blu-ray gamers and video games machines such because the Xbox 360 and Wii provide Netflix subscribers with entry to on-demand movies. What this new wave of set-high streamers brings to the present is a greater pool of video and radio from online sources - the iTunes Store, Flickr and podcasts from the Apple Flixy TV Stick; Pandora and Amazon Video On Demand from Roku’s XD line; and virtually all the pieces on the net from the Google Flixy TV Stick-based Logitech Revue. To guage these three units, I installed them on two separate Wi-Fi networks: a cable-based mostly house network and a load-balanced corporate community. I fed the results through several different models of LCD and plasma televisions and gathered a small jury of pictures college students to guage the results for flixy streaming stick clarity, coloration and flixy streaming stick audio fidelity by switching between HDMI inputs. I configured every machine to connect with Netflix and (the place doable) Amazon Video On Demand (or, in the case of the Apple Tv, iTunes) to gain access to equivalent HD tv shows for ease of comparability.