Netflix: Roku vs. Tivo – tivo fail

I mentioned this on Facebook the other day, but wanted to post it here as well. With it being the holidays, there’s nothing to watch on regular TV, so our Netflix instant queue has been getting a good working over. Initially, because we’ve just moved and not everything is hooked up, we were trying out the new netflix app on the Tivo Series 3. Its very nice to have the app right on our regular set top box, but i was mildly annoyed by the slight clunky feel of the interface. pushing a button doesn’t immediately result i a re4sponse, cauasing you to click repeatedly at times (over steering). Next i noticed several movies wouldnt play at all. They would start, then skip randomly and rebuffer constantly. Still, for the most part we were able to watch a variety of TV shows and movies on the netflix app and satiate our viewing.
On Christmas day i decided to finally crack open the box the Roku was packed in and set it up. Before the move we hadn’t used the Roku much, so this was almost a relearning in some ways. Right away I was struck by how much more peppy and responsive the roku interface is than the tivo one. Every button click has an immediate feeling response. Then I was really surprised by the quality of the image – The Roku image quality was noticeably better than the tivo’s. We had just watch an episode of Friday Night Lights on the Tivo and it rebuffered several times during playback and was plagued by blockiness throughout the playback. Watching the same episode on the Roku showed none of the problems. I can’t be quite sure, but i think the Tivo was displaying the 480p version of the stream while the roku was able to playback the 720p (again, i havent done any rigorous documentation here as yet). One other quick test was La Vie en Rose – which has subtitles throughout. On Tivo, the subtitles were very blocky and obviously scaled up (in a bad way). The roku had much smoother, much more legible subtitles.
Bottom line for me is the Roku is doing a much better job of streaming the netflix content than the Tivo application is. I am not exactly sure the reasons – true it has been out longer, but then i believe it was performing about the same straight out of the box. I do wonder if its taking advantage of some hardware scaling perhaps that the Tivo doesn’t have in order to get the better quality, but that wouldn’t explain the roku’s ability to lock onto higher quality streams and stick with it.

Tags: netflix instant, roku, tivo, watch now