Introducing TV Streaming at the Villas

Introducing TV Streaming at the Villas

To our beloved guests!

In the midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic Our Cable Television Provider declared Bankruptcy!!

And what this meant for us and guests of our Florida properties, is NO TV cable service as of July 2020.

Welcome to the Digital Age!

We are completing our transition to Streaming Services in January 2021.

The villas now feature ROKU Streaming Players in most rooms, which deliver television content over the internet. If you are not familiar with how this works, it can be a little daunting at first. But just like when TV first started being delivered by cable, if one takes the time to figure your way through it you will find 1) it actually does work, and 2) it’s not so bad once you’re used to it. In fact, in many ways it is much simpler than cable.

So…

The Roku Player, which has its own very simple remote, is the hardware that feeds the TV signal to the TV. It connects to the TV using an HDMI cable, so the input on the TV must be set to HDMI (Usually HDMI 1).

Some of our TVs actually have the Roku player built right into them, it isn’t a separate device.

The Roku device (similar to a cable box, but much smaller) allows you to access various Streaming Services, which are programming services which stream content over the internet.

The Roku devices in the home are already connected to the home’s wifi network. You don’t need to set them up, so please don’t play with their settings. Roku devices must be registered on a Roku Account to work, and they are already all set up and registered on our account (so don’t ‘borrow’ them, we’ll know where they are and where to find them!).

When you bring up the Roku main screen on the TV, you will see a number of Streaming Services to choose from, many which you will recognize as being available previously through cable providers, like ESPN. Many are quite new, like Disney+ which features Disney content.

For more information on how TV Streaming Works and how to Troubleshoot issues, please see this post here: How TV Streaming at the Villas Works

What and How to Watch

There is a lot of content available on the Roku, some of it free of charge, and some paid content which we have purchased for you.

1) Free Content Free channels include The Roku Channel, YouTube, The CW, CBS News, PBS Kids, iHeartRadio, and more with commercials.

2) Authenticated Cable This means watching content provided by your own paid for cable provider at home. Most cable providers now give their subscribers a ‘watch anywhere’ or ‘TV everywhere’ service which allows them to view subscribed services anywhere over the internet. You may use a service like this with your phone, for example, allowing you to watch your cable provided services on it, in addition to your regular TVs.

Accessing your own cable service that you are subscribed to at home is as easy as launching the channel on your Roku device, then following the instructions to activate or authenticate using your cable or satellite account information. (You did bring that with you, right? Likely not, of course, but it is often available online by logging in to your cable provider’s website to get the info.) TV Everywhere channels include ABC, ESPN, HGTV GO, CW, MTV, and Freeform – and there are no extra charges (besides your regular cable or satellite fees).

3) Subscription Streaming Services These are content providers that you get a monthly paid subscription to, which allow you to access content anywhere over the internet. The most well known is Netflix, and other popular ones include Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu and Sling.

4) Rent or Buy Content This is mentioned in order to provide complete information on using a Roku, but because purchasing content while at the villa means entering your credit card information which other guests could then use to pay for their content (exception: see below) we recommend NOT doing this at all.

How to Watch more than Free Content

There are two ways to watch Paid Content (besides using your own paid cable content as described above).

1) Access Your Own Paid Streaming Services Update: We no longer encourage this, for a variety of reasons. Please see the other post on TV Streaming linked above for more information.

You may have heard of ‘Guest Mode’ on Roku players. This is something we will not do with our Rokus players, as doing so completely wipes all of our own accounts and programming from our Rokus devices, necessitating up to an hour of reprogramming and reinitializing account access on each device. This is a facility for Rokus devices which simply is immature and unusable in its current implementation.

You may log into your own paid streaming services using our Roku devices, however you do so at your own risk. If you do this, please delete your account (and only your account) prior to departure. Again, please see: How TV Streaming at the Villas Works for more details.

2) Access OUR Paid Streaming Service Just as we used to pay a monthly cable fee in order to provide TV content for our guests to watch, we now have a monthly subscription to a general content streaming provider, which we provide to our guests free of charge. The service we have available is called hulu.

This is the easiest way for our guests to watch ‘normal’ TV. Simply select hulu on the main Roku content screen, and then select the channel(s) you want to watch.

As we are giving all of our guests free access to our Roku and Hulu accounts, please don’t try to ‘reverse engineer’ our account information and ‘borrow’ the use of our accounts elsewhere or when back home. Like so much in the vacation rental industry, we offer you use of our subscriptions on the honor system, and appreciate your not taking advantage of this.

What is available to watch on our hulu subscription at the villas? Lots!

Hulu content falls into two categories:

The Hulu Library which is (like Netflix) a collection of currently available movies and tv shows. There are 2500 of them available! Use the link below to see them online, or just search for your favorites using the Roku and Hulu channel.

and

Hulu Live TV which is just like tuning into a live TV broadcast using an antenna or cable subscription. Here is a list of the channels available on hulu at this time (January, 2021).

ABC
ABC News Live
ACC Network
Adult Swim
A&E
Animal Planet
Big Ten Network
Bloomberg
Boomerang
Bravo
Cartoon Network
CBS
CBS News
CBS Sports Network
Cheddar
CNBC
CNN
CNN International
COZI TV
The CW
Discovery Channel
Disney Channel
Disney Junior
Disney XD
E!
ESPN
ESPN2
ESPNews
ESPNU
ESPN College Extra
Food Network
Fox
Fox Business
Fox News
FS1
FS2
Freeform
FX
FXM
FXX
FYI
Golf Channel
HGTV
History Channel
HLN
Investigation Discovery
Lifetime
Lifetime Movies
MSNBC
MotorTrend
NASA TV
National Geographic
Nat Geo Wild
NBC
NBC Sports Network
Olympic Channel
Oxygen
Pop
QVC
SEC Network
Smithsonian Channel
Syfy
TBS
TCM
Telemundo
TLC
TNT
Travel Channel
TruTV
Universal Kids
USA
Viceland

Check out everything available on Hulu at this link here: Online guide to hulu content

Author description

BOV Host

About the author:Rob Peters is the Site Administrator, Blogger and Chief-Touble-Maker on BreezyOakVillas.com When not online, he is managing his terrific vacation rental properties in Florida, or admiring his three adult kids and loving his wife Donna.