I brought myself a Roku Streaming yesterday, and I must say I am very impressed. I have a Xbox 360 and a 22" Samsung smart TV. The smart TV isn't the great, ITV Player and Demand 5 (also Demand 5 on the Xbox 360) are rubbish (I'm on a 50mb+ connection). But on the Roku Stick they have both seemed flawless so far, and I would even say the picture quality on ITV Player on the Roku trumps the Samsung Smart TV.
Also any private channel recommendations on the Roku would be nice.

The ITV Player on the Roku or Now TV box offers the best quality that I have seen as well.

Although my own tests only put it at an average of 1260kbps, which is far from great, at least with its own home-grown content, the encapsulation is so good it now looks pretty close to the BBC's SD streams.

Sadly, the UI is rubbish. No Watchlist, No Resume function, No Episode Management, No cross-platform support and a bizarre way to access additional episodes.

Have to agree with the op i've had my ROKU1 for a couple of weeks now and it certainly is worth the £49.99 i paid for it.
If only there was a way to get iplayer etc onto the USA menus that would make it the perfect box then.

Hi i currently have samsung smart tv and a now tv box.i have heard a lot of good things about the roku 3 and am interested in getting one,but am trying to justify the £100 price tag.Would a roku 3 offer me anything of value over my current setup other than a fast processor?.

Mainly Motion control games (i've looked at them and they aren't that very good). The other pluses are Ethernet, USB & microSD slot, also a headphone port in the remote for private listening.
Also I have a Samsung 22" smart tv with a dual core processor, I think on some things the Roku stick is faster.

There is! Buy the roku on Ebay.co.uk from a seller that ships overseas and run it through a vpn router. ITV and 4oD are crystal clear near HD. I subscribe to Now TV as well. Great stuff worth the money too.
Interestingly the Roku 3 in the Uk is £99 that is around $168, yet in the USA its $99!

Actually, you can use switch the Roku's between UK and US pretty easily these days as they now use the same firmware, at least with the Roku 3 (I haven't tested with other models).

Pretty easy process, and you can follow the steps here to turn a US model into a UK one.

Catch: Well, you can't merge apps. This is what most people want I suppose.

There are STB's that easily allow this, with the Xbox One and PS4 coming to mind, but they are a bit expensive. Perhaps when the PS4 Streaming box (and perhaps the much cheaper PlayStation TV when it is released in the EU/US in Q3).

Thanks guys i ended up buying a Appletv for us stuff and keep the ROKU for uk stuff.

Thanks for that, I shall experiment with the US version and possibly report my findings here. I have a UK credit card, well many actually, but the billing addresses are in the USA. I wonder what effect that will have?
I am using a PPTP VPN connected directly to my router isp in the UK, can someone elaborate on the DNS that was mentioned in the article? Not sure what that is exactly - other than the term domain name server springs to mind, but makes no sense in this situation!

I echo what the OP has said. I was quite early to the Roku pact, I got mine in December 2012 when they were fresh on sale in the UK. To say I was disappointed is an understatement, besides BBC iPlayer there was not much on offer unless you paid for a Netflix subscription. To get some value from the box I did fork out the £5.99 for Netflix and funnily enough, its one subscription I have kept going since. Besides these two apps though, their was nothing else catered for the UK market. So I ended up unplugging it and letting it gather dust.

When I heard Sky had struck a deal with Roku, I knew things would start looking promising. Now it has all 5 catch up services, as well as Netflix, Now TV and YouTube. I use it more than my PS3 these days! I love the fact that its low power and always ready to use. I've also grown to really like the simple interface, so much so that other platforms look too cluttered and fiddly to control.

I was able to sign up with a UK Roku account using my TSB debit card, the system took my details just fine and allowed the address and setting my country as the UK.
I will be off to costco to get a roku 3 as they are currently selling for $89 (£52).
I used WDTV Live as I need the sling player app. I wish that the sling on the Roku worked directly rather than needing iPhone to stream from. It'd be bye bye WDTV if it did.