I’ve written a lot about Connected Television over the last few months and cord-cutters are aware of some of the more standard means of streaming content to their television sets: set-top boxes like AppleTV, Roku, and Xbox 360, to dongles such as the inexpensive Google Chromecast. There are of course the SmartTVs out there with WIFI connectivity and where Netflix Hulu and some of the more standard streaming offers are prebaked. Samsung is the leader in this space with LG a close 2nd.
There are some lesser known but interesting alternatives that provide a different experience, different price points, but ultimately afford us the means of alternative to cable subscription.
Boxee Box is one that is less known and more expensive set-top boxes. They recently got acquired by Samsung. The neat thing about Boxee is that the unit provided what they called Cloud DVR functionality in a beta format, but have since abandoned this.
WDTV Live from Western Digital has a strong price point at about half the cost of the Roku or Apple TV. Navigation can be a bit frustrating on this device but it certainly works for Netflix and some of the more standard offers. I have an older version I use in conjunction with a large capacity hard drive for stored media. It works well for me in that capacity but I don’t use it for streaming content.
The Nintendo Wii U is an interesting device if you want gaming, streaming and an Internet browser. Again not a cheap device as it pokes close the 300-dollar mark. But it’s simple to use, and provides a video chat feature which is interesting.
Probably one of the easiest and cheapest alternatives is still your laptop. Especially if it has an HDMI output as most current computers do. Connecting your laptop to your TV creates a second screen environment allowing you to stream anything that’s on your computer to the TV set. The cost of an extra long HDMI cable is fairly minimal.
