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tdp2664 InvestorPlace This premium-television business is getting nerve-wracking as 2012 revs up. Right now, there’s no clear path forward. Are traditional cable and satellite services surviving? Are on-demand, streaming services like the much-maligned Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX ) going to take over the world, forcing all sides of the business to reevaluate how to generate revenue from advertising? Shake your Magic 8 Ball…and the answer is, “Reply hazy, try again later.” According to Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, the entire multichannel TV-services business, from Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC ) to DirecTV (NASDAQ: DTV ), remained completely flat from September 2010 through September 2011. There are 100.8 million pay TV subscribers out there. Meanwhile, a survey conducted by research group Deloitte claims that 9 million subscribers stopped their pay-TV service in 2011 in favor of streaming alternatives like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon ‘s (NASDAQ: AMZN ) Amazon Prime. That’s a massive discrepancy that illustrates the one certain point: Change is afoot. Old and new need to meet somewhere in the middle to keep consumers happy and advertisers spending, and the key to that is making the service even cheaper and more accessible. To that end, Roku is blazing a promising trail. Its latest device could be a game-changer. Roku make a line of set-top boxes that plug into your television, not unlike TiVo ‘s (NASDAQ: TIVO ), but Roku’s boxes are built specifically for streaming television and entertainment services. The new Roku device isn’t a box at all, though. On Tuesday, the company announced its Streaming Stick , a tiny dongle that plugs into an HDTV’s HDMI port and provides the same range of service as more familiar boxes. About the size of an eraser, the stick would seem to make turning a regular TV into a Web-connected TV as simple as plugging it in. Like the boxes, the stick offers a broad selection of channels. These range from free options such as News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS ) properties Fox News and Wall Street Journal Live to additional premium services such as Netflix, HBOGo, Amazon Instant, and NBA League Pass. This is in addition to other entertainment apps such as games ( Angry Birds ) and Internet radio ( Pandora (NYSE: P ). Roku also creates some of its own content. The boxes are versatile and cheap, ranging in price from $50 to $100. The Stick is also expected to fall in that price range. In the race to bring television audiences to connected living-room viewing — i.e., television and entertainment from the Internet — Roku has done an admirable job since its boxes went on sale in 2008. The company has sold around 2.5 million Roku boxes, putting it on par with
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