At my house we love movies. Lots of movies. Can’t get enough. Between my roomate and myself we were dropping over $30 a month at Blockbuster and probably a spindle of DVDs on downloads. We had cable and satellite TV yanked out years ago after feeling that there are only so many times you can watch the same movie over and over again on the cable/sat movie channels. If you sign up for a program with, for example, three premium movie channels, you are burning up around $65 a month on your TV entertainment. Even in these trying times we found ourselves dropping a bundle of money to stay entertained. No more.

Now at my house we are watching all the movies we want, when we want and are paying a total of about $16 a month. It is like an all you can eat buffet. The solution to our movie watching woes is a one-two combo punch from Netfilx and Roku.

I was a member of Netflix a few years back and loved the convenience but quit using the service the last time we had cable TV. In the quest for more movies, I signed up again and noticed that Netflix now had an on-demand streaming internet service so you could watch one of the 14,000 movies they have converted on your computer or “Netflix enabled device.” Wondering what such a device looked liked, I clicked on the link and my life changed.

For $69 I downloaded the Roku network video appliance. My roommate and I went to Netflix and put 200 movies in our on-demand queue. The device is easy to setup with your local wireless or wired home network. After about 15 minutes of setting up the box to sychronize with our router and Netflix queue, we were watching movies almost instantly. If we want the latest blockbuster hit movie, we put it in our Netflix delivery queue, if we want something older, it goes in our streaming queue. You also have access to other great video and music services such as Pandora. I grab my Roku remote and dial in the Monte Montgomery or Hellecasters channel and I am rocking to my favs and similar artists. Its a legal Napster folks!

To make a long story short, we now have two Roku boxes, including one that streams HDTV, in both of the bedrooms and are watching movies, HBO, Showtime and other premium series. If you already have a decent Internet connection, you are good to go for saving a lot of money on movies. Check it out at roku.com.