In the old days (two years ago) there was a channel available on the Roku that would display a burning fire and play appropriate holiday music. So, people without a fireplace but who wanted one could pretend. I think there were channels like this on Cable or Satellite TV as well but I’ve not had those services in decades so I’m not sure.

The channel on the Roku was called Presto. Presto had an ad or two that would run when the program started up, then very rarely, another ad would show up. A small price to pay for all that masonry and firewood.

But over time the number of ads on Presto increased and increased an increased. This morning, Huxley, who likes to have the fireplace on during the holiday season, turned on Presto, and was subjected to about eight or nine ads, not all of which were suitable for an eight year old.

Enough of that!

I went to Presto’s twitter page to tell them off, and there noticed a tweet in which a former Presto customer noted that the fireplace on Netflix is better because it is free of ads. So, Huxley and I went looking on Netflix.

The first Netflix fireplace we found was the Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays channel. A downside of the Fireplace and Melodies channel is that the camera occasionally zooms into the fireplace, to show a closeup of some of the burning wood. If that happened in a real fireplace you’d freak out. Also, as expected, it has music which might be annoying or questionable.

We checked out the “more like this” link on Netflix and found two more fireplaces.

Crackling Birchwood is an altenative with birch wood and the crackling sound of wood burning. The wood starts out barely burning and burns more and more over time. The fire lasts for a full hour, longer than it would in real life, but it does evolve like a real fire does. Sort of.

Classic Crackling Fireplace for your Home is a hardwood fire that also has no music and only crackling sound, starts out as a full blown fire, and evolves over time, nearly burning down near the end, and lasting one hour.

I think these all use some combination of fake and real logs, and a gas flame. Or maybe they are entirely made up special effects. But they look real.

There are no ads on any of these.

If you visit any Netflix fireplace, and look for “more like this” on your Netflix inteface, you’ll find the others, and perhaps some I did not notice.

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