I am a happy camper today, for I now have Netflix Watch Now on my Tivo.

I read the story at around midnight last night, but the update hadn't made it to my machine yet. This morning however I checked and it was there, and after a simple confirmation on my Netflix account I was up and running, watching anything in my queue.

Pros:
- my home theater gets its internet through powerline networking, but this doesn't create any sort of bottleneck that I can see, and it's more than enough bandwidth to stream the HD content that's available
- the HD content looks fantastic! the only time there's noticeable quality issues is in large black areas. I watched the beginning of Pan's Labyrinth and you could see some artifacts in the dark areas of the underworld, but in daylight/bright scenes it looked perfect. I haven't seen blu-ray yet, so I can't compare it to that, but on my 60" 1080p screen it looked much better than upscaled DVD.
- streaming starts very quickly. in a matter of about 5-8 seconds
- you can remove movies from your queue from the Tivo interface
- none of this costs me anything extra with Tivo or Netflix, and it's not like this was ever promised to me when I signed up for either service

Cons:
- the single biggest problem with the service is the selection, but I have faith that it will get better. Besides, I think of the last item I mentioned under the pros: I didn't pay anything for this, and I wasn't getting it before, so for me it's nothing but positive
- the interface is pretty ugly. Tivo's interface is getting pretty old, but this one is worse. The bar that comes up when you fast forward and rewind is especially ugly. They could have just taken Tivo's bar and given it Netflix colors.
- speaking of fast forward and rewind, it's not very good, but it's about as good an implementation as I think you're likely to find on a streaming video service.
- you can't browse the watch now section of Netflix from Tivo. You have to use another computer to add items to your queue. Not the end of the world, and it's much easier to browse the selections from a computer anyway.
- the most annoying negative to me is that I see no way to tell which videos are in HD. The first indication you're given is when you start playing a video, and it starts buffering the video. at this point it tells you the kind of quality you're going to expect, and to the right it will either say "HD" or it won't.


Overall, I'm extremely excited about this. I prefer Netflix's model to any of the others (thought I know the studios don't), so I really hope they succeed. Anyway, I just thought I'd share. I've been looking forward to this for a month now, so this is an exciting day.

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On a larger topic, I'd be interested in hearing what the folks here think about the future of digital video distribution. I know we have at least one person here who canceled their TV subscription services in favor of iTunes, but I'd like to know what everyone thinks. Personally, I tend to think that blu-ray isn't going away anytime soon, but I don't think it has any hope of being the success that DVD was. On the other hand, it currently takes a lot more to get the average consumer access to digital downloads than it does for physical media, so I'm not sure how successful that will be until the process is simple.

Additionally, in all these debates I hear over this subject, I always want to ask the debaters the following: "okay, I've heard what you think the current situation is, but in an ideal world, what would you like to see?" So I ask you folks: what would your ideal system be, reasonably speaking?

Personally? My ideal system is possible right this moment, but the studios are the problem. My ideal is exactly like Netflix's current model, except with a selection matching their current physical media offerings. How great would that be? $20 a month and access to pretty much any movie you could think of? An even now, you can watch the current season of Heroes, much of it in HD. How much more can you ask for? But it's clear that the only road block is acceptance by the studios. Obviously the technology is there, I'm using it right now.

Sorry to ramble on so. This area is one of the most fascinating to me, from the consumer standpoint.

I wanted to try this with my 360, but I don't pay for an Xbox Gold account. No soup for me!

For starters, I'd like some box consolidation in my home theater. Right now, I've got an aging DVD player, a TiVo-HD, and an AppleTV.

I bought the AppleTV after spending weeks dorking around and failing to get a decent on-screen UI to stream my music from iTunes down to the home theater. (This was prior to the iPhone "remote" app, which combined with an Airport Express, would have done the job.)

Now that class is over, I'm going to start dorking around with patchsticks for the AppleTV. With Hulu or Boxee or whatever else, I should have a pretty good way to get at free stuff online (e.g., missed TV shows) as well as ripped DVDs on my computer.

I've held off on getting a NetFlix account, but this would seem to increase the value proposition to the point that it's worth it. I'd rather pay $9/month for all I can eat than feel artificially constrained by Apple's $2/show prices. (I'll listen to music over and over, but I rarely want to rewatch a TV show or movie.)

Bumping up the DVD player to a Blu-ray or whatever doesn't seem like it's worth the bother. None of the content I really care about is available on Blu-ray. My daughter, who will happily watch her kid shows over and over, is quite happy with whatever the TiVo has happened to grab. Regardless, I just don't trust the standard box builders to get the UI even half-way right. If I could get rid of shiny round discs altogether, I'd be happy.

My only gripe with NetFlix or AppleTV or whatever is that they don't give you the DVD menus, the multiple soundtracks, and so forth. That's just lame, since you only need to stream one at a time. You've got the damn data. Ship it!

Ideally, at the end of the day, there should be one box in the home theater. Give me TiVo hardware with Apple software (but not Apple's useless remote control), and then toss in third-party extensibility, of the sort that neither Apple nor TiVo is supporting, and then you'd have a real winner.

Oh, and please get Hollywood a clue. No more shiny discs. No lame DRM. I'll give you more of my money if you stop annoying me every time I want to give you money.

Thanks for posting about this. I'd heard that they were planning to do it, but I didn't know that it was going to happen so quickly. I also didn't know that there was going to be any HD content available.

Time for me to reinstate my Netflix account.

I'm still not a big fan of virtual-only media. Yeah, it makes sense for a lot of reasons, but I always worry about stuff I own being under someone else's control, lack of built-in backup, obsolescence, etc. Some of that would be resolved by getting rid of DRM, but that's unlikely to happen. I understand the studios' desire to have some ability to prevent unlimited copying, but it doesn't work, and my understanding of it doesn't make it less hindering to me. But I do also want a physical copy. My "need" for that has reduced somewhat in recent years, especially with easy redownloads becoming more commonplace. But I still worry about my copy disappearing. I suppose that makes me a luddite to some extent.

However, if it's under the auspices of rentals, I think digital delivery is a great thing. I need no physical copy because I'm not hanging onto it anyway. DRM isn't really as big a deal when you don't own anything anyway. And the library-style renting is great. There's something that tweaks me about paying for a digital download I can't keep, but if you're just paying a fee for access to everything, that just feels different.

Yeah me too. I keep reading the videogame sites saying how great it is that Microsoft added that for free. Yeah free if you subscribe to gold and netflix. Have you tried play on media server ? I tried the demo and it works really good streaming to the 360 and the PS3. The only bad thing was you could only watch what was in your instant view queue.

For you guys with the series 3's can you browse netflix or just play stuff in your queue ?

I have been playing with PlayOn on my PS3, but I'm pretty sure it works with the Xbox as well.

PlayOn gives you access to Hulu, Netflix, CBS and maybe something else I can't recall. I've only checked out the CBS and Hulu feeds, but the results are quite good. 16:9 content fills the screen and generally looks higher-res than SD DirecTV. The video seems to be less than 30FPS, but it's certainly usable if I happened to miss a show.

Actually, I have been using the PS3 a whole lot lately to watch television I've downloaded. It actually makes me question the $100+ I pay DirecTV every month. If the PS3 had a DVR function for OTA, I could consider pulling the plug on DirecTV at this point. At the very least, I'm considering scaling-back my programming tier quite a bit.

The PS3 has been one of the best entertainment purchases I've ever made, and I don't play games.

No. That was one of the cons in my post, but like I said, it doesn't bother me too much anyway. It's still easier to browse for things on a computer anyway. For example, when I got home today I added about 20 movies to my queue in about 4 minutes. Even if I knew exactly what I wanted to rent, it would take far longer than that with a Tivo or AppleTV remote.

Yeah I have been using the xbox more for video than games. I only use that over the ps3 because I bought the remote for the 360 before the ps3 was released. I agree hulu works really good too.

My thoughts so far:

90% of the time I can't get into the "Video On Demand" menu. Sometimes it just pops me back to the TiVo menu after a few seconds and sometimes it tells me that there's "Scheduled Maintenance". When I do get in, I can only enter the NetFlix menu about 50% of the time; it just pops me back to the TiVo menu.

Not being able to search via the TiVo is silly. This might put a kink in the wife's usage of it.

The aspect ratio is all screwy. I have a first-generation HDTV. It's a 4:3 tube that switches to 16:9 when it detects a 16:9 signal. It works perfectly with the normal TiVo UI. However, it's always had some problems with the VoD stuff, but until now they've been minor, never affecting the actual video. Until now. I just tried to watch No Country for Old Men, and it was stretched all tall. I've been trying to get back into the Netflix app to try some things, but it's been constant "Scheduled Maintenance" for half an hour now.

I do like the fact that it seems to actually be streaming, as opposed to being saved on the TiVo's hard drive. Don't have to worry about programs falling off the end of the queue because of that, unlike the Amazon VoD service.

This says


So is, or is not, HD content available on the Tivo/Netflix combination.

I did notice that this requires a Netflix Unlimited account at $8.99/mo.

Interesting. I've had no problems at all. Maybe there are a lot of other people trying it out, it being the first day and all, and they aren't prepared for the hit.

It is. That page is clearly not updated yet, because HD has been on the 360 since the service started, and just came out on Tivo today. However, I don't believe the Roku box has HD yet.


Yes? Is it surprising? I think that's more than fair. You get unlimited movie streaming starting with the unlimited accounts. Eventually I might downgrad my own account to the $9 one. With every "disc-at-a-time" upgrade, you're able to register another device/computer with your account. I think that's a pretty cool model, actually. My parents have a hacked AppleTV with Boxee, so I'm going to give them access to the account. So maybe I'll got to 2 at a time.

I found the option to fix the stretching thing. It'd be nice if it would display anamorphically, though, instead of letterboxed.

Even though I don't have a Netflix account, I too saw some problems. I dove into the menus down to the "Free Trial" screen and back out. On the way out, there was a really long pause on a gray screen. I was thinking about pulling the plug when it came back. Even then the "Broadband Video" screen had thin gray pillerboxes. Very odd that, they were less than 1/4 the width of normal pillerboxes.

Even the "Amazon on Demand' screens are acting up. When scrolling through the Top Movie Rentals, at times the menus froze. Tivo did queue up all the remote clicks and burned through them when it unfroze.

$8.99/mo did seem odd. I was expecting some kind of PPV kind of pricing.

I've long thought that content without hard media was enormously overpriced.

Seriously? $9 a month is "enormously overpriced"? I think that's crazy. You do realize that this is a rental service, right? If you want a PPV system, there's already several choices for you, so why on earth would you expect PPV from Netflix, whose entire business is in a rental subscription model?

Okay, lets look at it this way. Lets look at what what $9 gets you if you want physical media:

- 2.5 rentals at Blockbuster
- 3/4 of an average DVD purchase at Best Buy
- 9 Red Box rentals (not sure if everyone here has heard of Red Box or not)

And while we're at it, lets look at what else $9 will get you in movie entertainment:

- in my area, $2 short of a movie ticket at the theater
- $1 short of two HD movie rentals on iTunes
- $1 short of two HD movie rentals on Vudu
- a few pay per view purchases on most cable/satellite systems


You should also remember that at the moment, that $9 also gets you unlimited delivery of actual DVDs. Granted, it's only one at a time, but you could still easily receive, watch, and return approximately 8-10 DVDs a month by my estimation.

To call that "enormously overpriced" is, IMO, very unrealistic and not helpful in getting the studios to feel any better about the digital age.

I agree. You could easily watch a movie a night with the Netflix On-Demand.

Well, you might run out of things to watch pretty quickly. It seems like a huge portion of the On-Demand library is filler.

And there are so many decent movies (and otherwise) available for $0 over the air. Some in HD, many in SD.

There are? Maybe where you live, but not here.

The number of OTA stations we receive here is a mere fraction of what is available OTA in most USA markets. But even so, the MythTV box now has about 10 movies stored waiting for me to watch, and is picking up a new one about every second night or so (December typically has lots of movies).

That's in addition to the 6 movies we watched/skimmed/deleted over the weekend, and does not include the Harry Potter series which is currently airing (one each Sunday).

Admittedly, a PVR (eg. MythTV) is necessary to snag many of them, at nice hours like 02:00-04:00, but who wants to watch commercial TV "live" anyway? The flicks are all commercial-free when we do watch them.

Not as good as the DVD -- "edited" to fit standard TV slots and restrictions, and no "making of" extras. But.. $0 -- a useful thing during times such as these.

Cheers

Which I refuse to watch.

Regardless, here's what's available OTA to me in the next 7 days:

Captain America (1992)
Pelea de Fondo (1979) (Spanish)
Home Alone (1990)
Batman & Robin (1997) (Spanish)
El Sueño de Todo Niño Hecho Realidad (1994) (Spanish)
Christmas Town (2008)
National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
Superman IV: En Busca de la Paz (1987) (Spanish)
El Imitador (1995) (Spanish)
Guadalupe (2006) (Spanish)
The Flight Before Christmas (2008)
A Grandpa for Christmas (2007)
Silent Night (2002)
Revancha (1999) (Spanish)
Nicholas Nickleby (2002)
In the Bedroom (2001)
Christmas at Water's Edge (2004)
Magia en el Agua (1995) (Spanish)
Gloria (1999)
The Great White Hype (1996)
Last Chance Cafe (2006)
Emboscada (2003) (Spanish)
Trece Campanadas (2002) (Spanish)
Nicholas' Gift (1998)
Eye of the Tiger (1986) (Spanish)
Azul Intenso (2002) (Spanish)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Surviving Christmas (2004)
Hogfather (2006)
Boogeyman (2005)
Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)
Alaska (1996) (Spanish)
Policia Demoledor (1996) (Spanish)
Jack Frost (1998)
Alma Morena (1986)
Fifteen Minutes (2001)
Lost in Space (1998)
Inspector Clouseau (1968)
Cómodas Mensualidades (1992) (Spanish)
Black Mask 2: City of Masks (2002)
Loch Ness (1996)
Radio (2003)
The Closer You Get (2000)
Forever Mine (1999)
Valentín de la Sierra (1968) (Spanish)
Mi Amiga la Sirena (2006) (Spanish)
El Complot (1997) (Spanish)
Treasure Planet (2002)
The Anniversary Party (2001)
The Santa Clause 2 (2002)
Pinocchio (2008)
Spaceballs (1987)
EDtv (1999)
Inspector Gadget (1999) (Spanish)
Spy Game (2001) (Spanish)
Pandillas Bicivoladoras (1986) (Spanish)
A Texas Funeral (2000)
Grumpier Old Men (1995)
Infierno Bajo Tierra (1997) (Spanish)
La Gran Pelea (1992) (Spanish)

Hm, admittedly more than I expected, but it's not exactly a list of winners. For one thing, nearly half are on the Spanish language channels (and I doubt they run English as an SAP). A good number are clearly special broadcasts for Christmas. And a handful are made-for-TV. The only one I'd go out of my way to watch is In the Bedroom, and there's no way I'd watch that in an expurgated version.

There's five or six on that list that I would record and watch/skim afterwards. For $0.

But my media addiction is very recent (and still somewhat mild), so I'm way behind in watching movies. I've only ever seen a handful of the ones on that list.

Cheers

I've seen everything on that list that I wanted to. And some I didn't.

One underlying problem with all of these services, is the Micawber-esque one that if you watch X good films per week, and the studios between them issue Y good films per week, and X>Y, then, however deep a buffer you've got in-between, one day you're going to run out.

Peter

I've been using the Netflix on my 360, and so far I've been impressed with it. The only thing that I have a bit of a problem is that I do have to use a computer to add things into the Queue, but I normally have my laptop nearby so it's not that big of a deal.

Between that and my S2 Tivo, I'm pretty happy.

Of course you are correct, I can only plead to have miss written the second part of my note. It wasn't meant to be a comment about Netflix's pricing, but more generally about individually priced items, books, music...

That's why my media addiction has the form of recording to DVD (via DVD/HD PVR) every film available on cable that either I didn't see and it looks interesting on IMDb, or I had watched and liked it, so it is a good candidate for re-watch. For example, I added recently several classic Antonionis to the collection - I can watch Blow Up or Zabriskie Point anytime - but also a couple of beautiful (or just interesting) recent Vietnamese features I never heard of. Anyway, I record much more than I manage to see, and I am slowly becoming a videostore for my friends

No problem, sorry to get crazed on you

I'll certainly agree that digital distribution prices, on average, are unreasonable. I've always thought that every movie on the AppleTV should be $1 cheaper at each level (SD and HD). Take a new release SD movie on iTunes. That's $4. That's about the same as your local video store. Sure, I'll admit that it's much more convenient, but my logical brain is wondering why it isn't a little cheaper, considering the cost to house and distribute that digital file is far lower than a DVD in a video store.

Anyway, I've been having a blast with the Netflix integration. I just pray the studios ease up and allow more stuff to be streamed.

Does anyone know if there's a way to directly do Netflix on the PS3, i.e., without needing the PlayOn software running on a Windows PC on the network?

I doubt it, and this isn't good news for it.