I bought a ROKU over the weekend as a birthday present for myself. I haven't had cable in years, and rarely turn my antenna tv on except for hell's kitchen/master chef/NCIS/Criminal Minds and shows on the PBS/HDchannel Create, and morning local news. I mostly stream content from JTV, and regular hulu. I noticed late last week, that I'm sitting in my living room watching feeds on my small laptop (usually toggling between the tab with the streaming content and HBT) for hours on end while my tv, which is larger (but not a big screen) sits dark, and I decided to pay 60 bucks to at least stream the programming I like onto a larger tv.
I'm still learning about it, but happy so far. There are a lot of Private channels on there, besides the listed big channels on there. I was able to find most of the radio streams for the non local stations I tend to listen to online from the US and Canada, though I can't find a stream for Radio Ireland which I like to listen to on Saturday afternoons if I am home.
There's several local network live tv streams available, but nothing for the metro detroit area unfortunately.
I was able to find REGULAR hulu and Youtube via the PLEX media server that I had to downloand and link my PC and I-phone. It took a lot of searching online on roku forums to find a clear explanation of what you need to do to find those hidden channels, since it seems most of the ROKU providers are trying to push the subscription channels such as Hulu Plus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. ANd there's some software setting the "conveniently" have selected in the preferences both on the Roku and on the pc that block a lot of content. And they don't explain easily how to find them and change them, so things like Youtube and regular hulu show up on searches.
Everyone keeps saying you need a PC to do these things, but have you actually googled "Using ROKU with Macs?" I just did, and it looks like there's a lot of articles, so it appears that in order to run some of the media servers you need a COMPUTER, regardless of what platform...I know it works fine with my I-phone, I can use the ROKU app to control it instead of the remote (you can use the touch screen Iphone keyboard to search rather than having to click each letter with the arrow keys and "OK" button to search for things.)
I find it doubtful in the era of cross platforms and huge popularity of Apple products that they're NOT compatible with the ROKU.
In fact T
HIS ARTICLE show how to use the PLEX media server on a Macintosh computer. So it doesn't look like the Macintosh is being ignored by ROKU
But it does look like you need some form of computer to add the private channels to your ROKU. Hope this helps.
