Netgear Partners with Roku on Sub-$100 Streaming Video Player

With D-Link due to launch the much-hyped Boxee streaming video player Nov. 10, Roku and Netgear have teamed up on a midrange streaming player that began selling through Best Buy, Radio Shack and Fry’s late last month. The $89, 1080p video box delivers content from Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix, and MLB.TV and will start streaming Hulu Plus as a premium service later this fall, Roku said.

Boxes at Netgear come in at $10 more than Roku’s price of $79 for the Model XD box, which is the same except for the Roku brand and which ships direct from Roku’s website. The price delta leaves room for a retail rebate, Roku Product Management Director Tom Markworth told us at the Showstoppers event in New York last week. Markworth said the Netgear partnership gives Roku a retail footprint that it hasn’t had. The partnership is “mutually advantageous” since Netgear “really hasn’t gotten a lot of traction in living room products,” he said, “and we don’t have a sales force to go out and effectively sell the major retailers."

The XD falls in the middle of Roku’s three-product lineup, between the entry-level HD (720p, $59) and XD/S (1080p, $99). Markworth said actual 1080p performance with the top-tier players will depend on the quality of the Internet connection. Consumers with lower-bandwidth connections could experience pixelation and other issues when trying to view movies in 1080p, he said.

The top two boxes include an instant replay feature that lets users skip back seven seconds. The feature is typically found on hard-drive based DVRs, but Roku has enabled the feature in the streaming player, which is built on an NXP Semiconductor video processor and 256 MB of RAM, Markworth said. According to Roku’s website, the feature may not work with all channels.

The top model includes a USB slot for user-generated content, Markworth said. MPEG-4 video, JPEG photos and MP3 audio are supported now, but the company is working on the final set of codecs, Markworth said. All of the boxes have Wi-Fi built in, he said, with the XD adding range via 802.11n Wi-Fi and the XD/S adding dual-band extended range 802.11n for users in apartment buildings.

Whether Roku and Netgear add products in 2011 hinges on the outcome of holiday sales, Markworth said. “We have a long way to go in terms of building our branding, because we're a small company competing against giants, and we're happy if people even knew about the product,” he said.