I got a new Roku Netflix Player for Christmas and it’s been a fairly mediocre addition to my media center until today. Roku has announced that they will be supporting Amazon’sVidoe on Demand.

Anyone familiar with Netflix’s on-demand service knows that the selection of movies is fairly poor. They are adding new movies all the time, but you almost never find one that is five star rated. I could not recommend the roku device to anyone for that reason, because you can only watch movies that are in the on demand que. You also have to add movies to your queue using a computer in order to watch them on the Roku device, a REALLY bad interface.

Once the Roku device adds Amazon on demand, it will be more useful, albeit probably only slightly. I have a feeling that you will probably be required to add them to a queue of some sort on Amazon, and not be able to do anything directly on the device except watch the movie. The iTV, which I won at a conference last year, has a similar downfall, having to have a computer on in the house with iTunes in order to do anything but watch YouTube videos.

I look forward to the coming update to the Roku device, but only because the receipt wasn’t wrapped in the box with my gift.

added: more coverage over at Venture Beat