I had a chance to briefly test the new channel, and it's a welcome update. When selecting the Netflix channel from the channel menu, you're presented with a grid of "DVD covers"--24 rows of videos, each with (on my TV) five visible items.

As you press the arrow keys on the remote, the rows scroll beneath a selection box, which always remains in the middle of the screen. A floating display shows information about the currently selected video: name, viewer rating, release year, time, MPAA rating, and a short description. When you've found a video you want to watch, pressing the Select button presents you with the standard Netflix-streaming options, which differ based on the type of video: play, resume playing (if you previously watched part of the video), choose a different episode (for TV series), rate, and add to or remove from queue.

The top row of videos displays your current Instant Queue, with the number of items in the queue noted at the top of the screen--this was essentially the entire Netflix channel previously, except that it was displayed in list view.

Scroll down a line to access the new options. The first is Search. Select this option and you get a text box that lets you search Netflix's streaming catalog--and only the streaming catalog--for videos. Like the Apple TV's remote, Roku's remote has no keyboard, so you must use the arrow buttons to select letters, one at a time, from the onscreen keypad to "type" the movie or TV show's name. However, search results appear as you type, so you don't need to type the entire name, and the results are smarter than I expected: when typing st, video names starting with St appear at the top of the list, followed by names with words anywhere in the title that start with St (The Stepford Wives, Cold Storage, and so on).

Oddly, choosing a video in the Search screen doesn't select it for playback. Instead, you're taken back to the main browsing screen, but the Search row now shows all the results of your most-recent search. You then select the desired movie.