MacWorld.com reports that Roku will announce on Monday a new software update for their lineup of Roku players which introduces their new Channel Store. The Channel Store, which will initially come with 10 channels, allows users to easily add additional content sources to their Roku media player. Initial channels include blip.tv video publishing, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel photo sharing and viewing, Mediafly podcast aggregator, MobileTribe, Motionbox video sharing, Pandora Internet radio, Revision3 Internet TV, and TWiT.tv.

You’ll need to set up a Roku account on the Roku website to add the channels to your player but all content is free. Some of the online services have multiple levels of membership – some of which will require a paid membership to access. Roku plans to add additional channels via software updates to the players.

The Channel Store will be an open platform and Roku will provide a free development kit in the hopes of spurring additional channel development from other media companies. Of course at the end of the day, the advancement of the channels will depend on the popularity of the Roku media players. The more consumers have the media players, the more likely companies will spend valuable time and resources developing channels for the platform.

The software update will be rolled out over the next two weeks via the player’s automatic software-update feature for all existing customers. You can read more about the software update over at MacWorld.com. Here’s a blurb from their hands-on of the update:

“While the new software increases the appeal of Roku’s players—and makes those who bought the original model back in early 2008 feel ever better about their purchase as it continues to gain new features—the update doesn’t include perhaps the two most-requested features. You still can’t browse Netflix’s Watch Instantly library from the Roku player; you must add movies to your Instant Queue from the Netflix Website. And you still can’t stream local media—for example, videos on your Mac or a network drive—to your TV through your player. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll eventually see these features; Roku would be well-served to provide them before Apple decides to make the Apple TV more functional.”

So true..

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