As Blu-ray continues to flop along like a dying fish, the marketplace is still hungry for a true digital delivery system. Best bets thus far have ranged with pay-per-use systems. AppleTV to Vudu. But now, there is a new player in town that certainly provides an interesting alternative – Netflix.

Now before everyone gets too excited, there are some disadvantages that simply must be considered before assuming that this is going to honestly take on the alternatives.

• It is low-def only. Yes, until Roku (the company selling the Netflix box) releases firmware for the tiny little device that provides hi-def abilities to the box, there is no real joy here for those on HDTVs. This means early adopters are not going to be very excited.
• 10,000 items to choose from, none of which are that compelling. You will not be finding the latest blockbusters here. Sure, you can find more overall content than you might elsewhere, but the age factor has to be examined. New releases will largely be bound to DVDs.

With all of this said, the single two biggest advantages to this over AppleTV and Vudu are the following:

• $99 plus $7.99 and you can watch as much content as you like. As long as the TV shows or movies are part of the Netflix libarary for instant download, it’s all you can eat. Content age and format aside, this clearly beats the competition with a stick.
• The box itself is brainlessly simple to setup. That and it is small.
• When you understand that Netflix is best for LONG TAIL content, not new releases, the value quickly becomes apparent. I personally never bothered to do much with movies using Netflix, but I used to use this to relive some of my favorite older and even classic TV moments from the ’70s-early ’00s.

So will this box succeed in getting into people’s living rooms? Yes, but not as it stands today. The lack of hi-def content is going to hurt this concept badly as most of the people who would bother to buy such a thing, often early adopters, will settle for nothing less than hi-def.

I on the other hand, am still using a classic TV set and am giving very serious consideration to picking up one of these boxes. And while most will point out that their cable provider already gives the user access to on demand content, much of it free, the fact is this – Netflix has much, much more available.

It may not replace traditional TV (cable, satellite), but it might eventually bring people a lot closer to it in the next couple of years.