When I purchased my first Roku about 8 years ago I quickly became convinced that it was the best $60 I had ever spent. The house I moved into in the mid-1990s was wired throughout it’s three floors for cable, but despite the constant barrage of junk mail, telemarketer calls and the occasional appearance of flesh-and-blood salesmen, my wife and I never saw the sense in signing up for a cable subscription. Before moving to that house, I had cable TV for years with an old roommate. I could take or leave cable, but the roommate thought it was as necessary as gas, water or electricity. Once the roommate and I parted ways, I ditched cable. It was sort of like escaping an over-priced, all-you-can-eat buffet that had lousy food and worse service. There was no point in getting back into a relationship with cable so the wife and I did without. We both worked second shift so we were never home for prime time. We relied on a steamer trunk partially filled with video cassettes of movies I had recorded when I still had cable. We would resort to rabbit ears occasionally. If we were desperate, we would head out to a video store which was a crap shoot and fairly pricey. As the decade drew to a close, I got a DVD player which led to subscribing to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service which led to Netflix’s streaming service a few years later which lead to spending the best $60 I ever spent on the Roku.
As I have written before, Netflix is the service that pushed me into getting a set-top internet streaming box and although I have since left Netflix, I’m glad I went with a Roku over the hardware offerings of Apple, Amazon and Google. Roku has an abundance of bizarre and free channels. It feels as if public access TV has exploded. My latest find is The Polka Network Channel. It’s everything you can expect from a polka channel as the screenshots up above can attest. It features a selection of video tapes of the Big Joe Polka Show featuring the late Joe Siedlik of Omaha bringing happy music for happy people for over 25 years. His show was syndicated in a number of markets, but sadly Philadelphia was not one of them which is weird since Philly does have similar tastes in the String Bands and Mummers. Despite that, the programs are a lot of fun and have the charm of low budget, locally produced programing. It’s sort of like American Bandstand for senior citizens only those seniors can really dance!
Get The Polka Network Channel HERE!
Um… Thanks, but I’ll pass on Polka Joe… 🙂
There’s something for everyone on that box! The search continues.