The Roku 3 is one of my two favorite gadgets of 2015, the other being the Harmony Remote Control system from Logitech. There are a lot of devices that turn your TV into a smart TV, but the Roku 3 has the best features, the best interface, and best lineup, at a reasonable, if not the cheapest price.
The Roku 3 plugs into one of your TVs HDMI ports and, after connecting to your home network, can stream content from Netflix, Amazon, and many more services. You can control the Roku with an app on your smartphone, or with the supplied remote.
The remote is the special sauce that raises the Roku 3 above the competition. When you plug the (included) earbuds or your own headphones into the remote, the sound on the TV cuts out and plays only through the headset! This means you can watch TV while those are trying to read, sleep, or otherwise be undisturbed by your programming. I dub this a marriage saving feature, as it has completely mooted (and muted) a regular end-of-day argument in our home: I just plug in my earbuds and can watch, leaving my wife in peace.
My only complaint about the feature is that if you forget to unplug the earbuds the battery drains very fast. It would be great if there was a switch on the side of the remote so that you could leave the buds plugged in, but not depleting the battery.
I love the agnostic more-or-less agnostic approach Roku takes to content. Its ever expanding list of compatible services means I am rarely at a loss to be able to stream. And you're not limited to 3rd party services. Using Plex, I can stream movies and videos from my network to the TV.
The Roku 3 can also be used as a game platform, however, this has not been a big use case here, where we have so many platforms to choose from.
One of the more interesting use-cases for the Roku 3 is when I'm traveling. I throw a small router in my bag along with the Roku 3 and then plug it into my hotel room's TV. Suddenly, instead of paying for on-demand movies, I have access to all my on-line content for free.
Although you can use a wired connection, with an AC router I have rarely had trouble with buffering on the Roku 3 in my apartment, particularly when streaming optimized files via Netflix or Amazon. Large, bandwidth-heavy files from the network do sometimes have a bit of "chop", but not consistently, leading me to believe the problem is related to other traffic on the network.
As of this writing I haven't yet tested the Roku 4 which adds 4K streaming. Since my TV (and probably yours) doesn't support 4K, and the availability of 4K source material is still slight (though growing), I might suggest sticking with the Roku 3 unless you're sure you're going to be moving to a 4K TV during the life of the unit. In a large house you may need to try it first, and determine if a wired connection or network bridge is needed.
