27 Nov 2009

Virtual elbows. My first BlackFriday online only experience

I had been debating purchasing the new Roku player and after I heard all of the buzz about it from the Streaming Media West show I figured it might be worth checking into. In my own words the Roku player is for those that have a good internet connection and want to gain access to a variety of online shows and entertain meant that you can't find on TV. And the best part is; it streams it all to your TV.

Some of the current partners Roku partners are NetFlix, MLB, Amazon, Pandora, Revision3, and more. From the looks of it they are just getting started! The quality of video that is now delivered online in most cases you will get a bit higher than DVD quality streaming. And on LCD it is crispy!

Depending on the model the Roku ranges from $79 to $129. It is a one time hardware purchase and that's it! Now granted, you will need a membership to some of the channels, i/e/ NetFlix ($8/mo) and MLB ($20/mo). But other channels are free of charge and in most cases are sponsored based.


So this being BlackFriday. Last night I received a tweet from @RokuPlayer announcing they were going to have a 50% off offer for their Roku HD-XR model to the first 500 at 8am. Laptop in hand and credit card propped and ready to go... at the top of the hour the page refreshed and the clicking commenced. I realize I didn't wait in line all night and yes I was still in bed ;). But you could imagine the thousands of people trying get in on this deal all at the same time.

As the pages loaded throughout the checkout process things started getting extremely slow. Slow enough that when I entered the coupon code I was welcome with "The service is unavailable" Nooo!!!!!!! In came twitter... I started posting messages to @RokuPlayer to see if their servers went down. And they kindly replied saying to keep trying. Then in came the messages that everyone else was having the same issues. We were virtually knocking each other out of the race to 500.

It was a fun experience chatting with others trying to get in on the deal and although I didn't brave elements of the in store black friday. It was a race for the deal. Some got it and some didn't .

I am happy to say, come 7 to 10 days I'll have a Roku sitting on the front porch. Whooop!