By Glenn Farr

    I will never forget November of 2000—that was the month I first hooked up to satellite TV. And I did so primarily because I was PO’d with my cable company after another rate hike.
    Little did I know the improvement in picture quality I was about to enjoy as an indirect result of my fit of pique. Back in those days, I really wasn’t aware of the differences between analogue and digital signals—that is, until I got a digital signal and saw the difference firsthand.
    Consequently, I fell so deeply in love with my satellite dish that I praised its maker throughout the land, encouraging all I knew to hook up. Some took my lead and agreed. My love for the little gray saucer was so strong, in fact, that when I moved a few years later, I chose my new house partly based on the exposure it would give me of the southern sky—that portion just above the horizon that served as a conduit for the magical signal that bathed my dish in crystal clear programming.
    When satellite went HD, my love deepened and it looked as if we’d never part.
    Hmmmm … until a little interloper named Roku caught my eye.
    Yes, a fetching little thing is this palm-sized box that also brings HD signals into my house and for a fraction of the cost of satellite. Of course, it’s not live 24/7—it’s on demand, but that can be a good thing in its own right.
Right?
Right.
    I must admit I was a latecomer to the altar of Netflix, which in a few short years has worked its own magic spell with those bright red envelopes whizzing back and forth between distribution centers and homes. Although those envelopes ferried their own variety of crystal clear digital entertainment, I couldn’t be bothered. Even though you could keep DVDs as long as you wanted, I didn’t budge. Not even the promise of no late fees aroused my interest.
    Then, a co-worker, and then a second, hammered the virtues of the service into my consciousness. So, I poked around on the Netflix Web site and discovered thousands of titles—everything from movies to TV series—that were not currently available through my beloved satellite service.
    So, I got my figurative toe wet by accepting a trial membership.
    I was soon up to the three-discs-at-a-time membership level and had added more than 400 titles to my queue.
    Whew!
    For a while I barely toggled my TV input away from the DVD player to the satellite receiver.
    Why had I not done this before? My rationale was that I was paying so much each month for that precious satellite signal, I had better darned well watch it.
    Soon, with all those rare and unusual DVDs flying into my mailbox every few days, that logic disappeared somewhere within the digital stream from the TV to my brain.
    Speaking of stream: streaming video was something I also had not found to be too interesting when the topic first whizzed past my ears. Yes, I had heard that the Internet would revolutionize TV and how we watch it with on-demand offerings available online. I knew that several services were already offering such product and network TV was fearful of losing its precious advertising revenue to broadband-ferried content.
    But I paid it no attention. That was not for me, I thought. I hate watching TV on a computer.
    Then, the little Roku waved at me one day from a secondary page on the Netflix site.
    “Yoo-hoo!” it seemed to say. “Wanna give me a try?”
    Well, why not? I reasoned. The little box’s purchase price wasn’t that much and I already had the broadband connection it would need to be able to stream everything to me.
    It took about a week for the Roku streamer to arrive, but it took only about five minutes to connect it to my TV and let it introduce itself to my wireless router. In less than a lunch hour’s time, I was watching a rare British TV comedy I had never seen offered on BBC America—and without having to wait even a day for a little red envelope to fly into my mailbox.
    For the next several weeks, I practically bowed before the Roku, adding as many titles to my “watch it now” queue as the Netflix masters would allow. Two seconds later, I’d call up my onscreen guide and each new title magically appeared, just waiting for me to click on it and watch.
    In December, the little box became HD capable and, well, most of my friends haven’t seen me since.
    Roku and Netflix are not the only providers of streaming video, nor are they the only content/technology partners each has. And soon, many other providers will be joining the rush to deliver video to our homes through a broadband connection. So, I am not offering these remarks as a specific endorsement of Netflix or Roku or any other service. I am, rather, intending to describe how a process—streaming video—caught me by surprise and within a remarkably short period of time changed how I use my television. I am flabbergasted by the speed with which I adapted to this particular technology.
    It may also change how much I’m willing to pay for what I watch. For example, my Netflix subscription, which allows me to watch as much streaming video as I can stomach without lapsing into a coma, costs about one fifth what I pay each month to DISH Network.
    Only time will tell if that ratio remains constant.