Our Roku boxes are supposed to be coming today and I’m starting to freak out a little bit. I mean on one hand I have nothing to worry about because we can try the Roku boxes for 30 days and if we aren’t satisfied with the service then we can return them for a full refund. I’m not freaking out about the Roku box and what channels they provide but more about what Hulu Plus doesn’t provide.

I wish that I had done all of this research 100% before I bought the boxes but I was so gung-ho on getting them to get the $20 New Years Eve discount that I just wanted to buy them before that sale was over. This is what I’m finding out about Hulu Plus.

If you visit the Hulu Plus page they show all these pictures of their shows but if you click “alphabetical” then check the box that says “currently airing” you will notice the list shrinks.

This is the main reason I bought this box. I thought I was going to be able to watch all of my shows that are on Hulu (in my TV page) but as it turns out, I’m only going to be able to see my fox cartoons minus the Simpsons, the event and that’s it. Why would I pay Hulu $7.99 a month to watch 4 shows? I’m gonna end up having to watch the majority of my shows on my laptop which is not what I thought I was signing up for.

The reason Hulu Plus doesn’t have all of the shows they have on their regular Hulu service is because they can’t legally stream everything to your TV, they aren’t licensed for that. So why bother showing a few shows at all if they can’t stream them all? I mean, Chuck and The Event are both on NBC and Hulu is owned by NBC. What confuses me about that is they can stream The Event but not Chuck? That doesn’t make any sense. And they have all those Fox shows but no Simpsons? What?

I also signed up for a month of free Netflix and they have a lot of shows I can stream through my Roku box but they aren’t current seasons. They probably can’t stream those until the very end of the season, in the summer time. I don’t want to have to wait until summer to watch my shows.

Ok so another thing I found last night was this program that you install on your PC but run the app or channel through the Roku is PlayOn. That gives you a 14 day free trial then it’s $39 for 1 year then I believe it said $20 a year after that. So it’s only a couple of bucks per month and it allows you to stream regular Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Fox News, TBS etc through your Roku box (or other devices).

I’m really hoping this works out for me because I need for it to work. I don’t want to feel like I have wasted my money on the Roku boxes so I can just get Netflix. The trouble with PlayOn is that I have to use my desktop as a server which means I can’t use it for anything else while we’re watching it on the Roku. That’s fine because I’m using the CR-48 laptop now primarily but I do use the desktop for TweetDeck. Unfortunately, it says my CPU is Low when it does the tests which means we’re probably not going to get a very good stream. But we won’t know until we get the Roku boxes in the mail.

Ok so I’m still waiting for the box to come with my mail, I checked the tracking and it is here in Bakersfield at my local post office so it looks like I will get it.

Our cables next billing cycle begins on Thursday so we have 3 days to try the Roku box to see if we are happy with it. If not they are so going back and we are going to keep cable. I’m just hoping they refund the money right away but I have a feeling it will take them awhile to send us the refund.

When the package has come and I have everything hooked up and have played around with it then I will come back and give more feedback.