Jim Rossman: Streaming TV 101

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I recently helped a friend set up a new mesh Wi-Fi router in his home, which opened up reliable Wi-Fi to his bedroom, which then enabled him to set up a new Smart TV for streaming.

For years, his Wi-Fi router was too weak to send the signal to the far end of his house, which kept him out of the streaming TV world. For all those years, he’d only had an over-the-air TV antenna for free broadcast channels.

When we set up his new Roku TV, we made the decision to start his streaming TV education slowly.

Roku TVs have all the steaming apps you’d ever want or need, and most of them require a subscription. Roku also offers something called the Roku Channel, which is a mostly free source of ad-supported streaming TV shows and movies.

We set him up to watch his local channels over the installed antenna and I showed him how to get into the Roku Channel. I also had to explain another concept, that of pay services nested inside Roku Channel.

Once you have set up the Roku Channel and logged in with your Roku account, you can subscribe to streaming services like HBO Max, Paramount+, Starz, AMC+ and many others from inside the Roku Channel using the payment method in your Roku account.

Roku does a good job of highlighting content on those pay channels, but I had to explain to my friend how to determine which movies and shows were free on Roku and which would cost money.

To be fair, most of the pay streaming services offer a short free trial, and they make it really easy to sign up, but I reminded my friend that if he signed up for any of those trials, he’d have to remember to cancel before the subscription renewed if he decided not to keep the subscription.

The Roku Channel also includes a selection of free Live TV channels. These are different from the local broadcast channels my friend receives. The Roku Live channels are streamed and include hundreds of channels – most of which I’ve never heard of – but there is something for everyone.

I had to explain the difference between broadcast live TV and streaming live TV.

My next visit with my friend featured a smart TV lesson on setting up his first pay subscription. I’ll write about that next week.