The benefit for me was that I already had an old laptop lying around. :)

I'm sure a Pi could work well for this too. It just needs to be powerful enough to display websites and videos smoothly.

Ahh I see. You are indeed right about the power. I will give it a try some time and share under this comment if everything is OK with the PI or not. Thanks for the article and the reply!

Used laptops are cheaper than Pi's.

A Pi would probably not be allowed full HD quality on most web streaming sites, it would not have hardware accelerated decoding of the DRM'ed video stream and the CPU is probably too weak to do software decoding.