We’ve had a Netflix Player/Roku set top box now for a few months, and we’ve used it quite a bit.

The short review:  a decent product execution, but with very limited video content. Netflix’s “watch instantly” offerings mostly consists of TV content and older movies.  It’s rare that you find recent, top-quality movies.  Our kids quickly ran out of new things to watch.

The physical product is very nice and compact (roughly the size of a 1″ stack of CD cases).  It has no buttons, and only a power indicator on the front.  The remote control is very straightforward with a small number of buttons, and the on-screen menus are simple and easy to understand.  Setup and configuration was very easy, and the box has Wifi so you don’t need a wired connection.

We do wish fast forward worked differently.  It’s not like a Tivo — instead, it scrolls through a set of small video still frames.  When you hit “play”, the box takes a few seconds to rebuffer and resume from the new point.  Fortunately, Netflix’s video content doesn’t have ads that need to be skipped.

Also, videos can only be added to your viewing queue through Netflix’s Web interface — you can’t choose new videos through the box itself.  This is much more useful than our cable company’s on-screen interface for selecting an on-demand movie, and we’ve found it helpful to limit what our kids can watch (while still letting them choose from a list of options).  However, if you sit down at your TV to watch something new, you’ll need to go find your PC to add the movie to your queue.

Bottom line:  for $100, we’d probably get one again, but we’re really hoping that Netflix brings more (and better) content on-line.