Netflix and Microsoft, Sitting in a Tree...

[Chris Gohlke]

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community...tflixteamup.htm

"An exciting new home theater experience is coming to living rooms this holiday season. At E3, Microsoft and Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to your television via Xbox 360®. Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets you instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. This movie-watching innovation will be available to Xbox LIVE® Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers, and will let those users enjoy streaming movies from Netflix on Xbox LIVE at no additional cost."

Now that there is an official, sanctioned way to stream from Netflix to the 360, it looks like come this fall I'll be upgrading to Xbox Live Gold and switching over to Netflix. The only thing that had been keeping me with Blockbuster, despite their being more expensive than Netflix, was the ability to trade in movies directly at the store. Frankly, the ability to stream over 10,000 items directly to my 360 outweighs the ability to periodically make a swap for a free in-store rental.

[Chris Gohlke]

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community...tflixteamup.htm

"An exciting new home theater experience is coming to living rooms this holiday season. At E3, Microsoft and Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to your television via Xbox 360®. Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets you instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. This movie-watching innovation will be available to Xbox LIVE® Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers, and will let those users enjoy streaming movies from Netflix on Xbox LIVE at no additional cost."

Now that there is an official, sanctioned way to stream from Netflix to the 360, it looks like come this fall I'll be upgrading to Xbox Live Gold and switching over to Netflix. The only thing that had been keeping me with Blockbuster, despite their being more expensive than Netflix, was the ability to trade in movies directly at the store. Frankly, the ability to stream over 10,000 items directly to my 360 outweighs the ability to periodically make a swap for a free in-store rental.

[Joel Crane]

Hey, this looks cool!

[superrrguy]

They need this tomorrow. Not fall!

The hack for WMC is slow and a pain in the ass to use.

[inteller]

You know, netflix should start a program like SETI where users could encode DVDs for them so they could get more titles set up to stream. Their current library is simply lame. Award users an extra title a month or something for however many blocks they process.

[Felix Torres]

Originally Posted by superrrguy

They need this tomorrow. Not fall!

Netflix needs to upgrade their servers first; that's why the deal has taken so long to be announced. (We all knew it was coming for over a year.)

(The coop viewing feature, though, took me by surprise. Once you hear of it, of course it is obvious--technically its no big challenge--but to think of it in the first place is sorta lateral thinking, no?)

Next step for MS is to see if they can sign up Hulu.
Get that free content in the stable and things will really get interesting.

Not that they aren't right now with 42 "channels", 10,000+ hours of on-demand content, more on-demand HD than (apparently) anybody else, and deals in place with Disney, Viacom, Fox, NBC/Universal (are they still ticked at Apple?), and TimeWarner. With yesterday's new additions (SciFi, USA, NBC for real, etc) they now have all the national networks except PBS.

Add-in the enhanced file sharing features (outgoing as well as incoming) in the 360 V2.0 upgrade and the 360 digital media functions will be taking a big step forward by fall. A lot will depend on the details but they seem to be serious about the social/sharing aspects; a lot of their talk sounds straight out of the Zune playbook.
Wonder why?

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by inteller

You know, netflix should start a program like SETI where users could encode DVDs for them so they could get more titles set up to stream.

I kind of doubt the problem is getting the DVDs encoded - it doesn't take that long to encode a DVD, even if you're doing three-pass encoding. I'm certain the real problem is the legal/licensing issues around it.

[Felix Torres]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

I kind of doubt the problem is getting the DVDs encoded - it doesn't take that long to encode a DVD, even if you're doing three-pass encoding. I'm certain the real problem is the legal/licensing issues around it.

Plus quality control.
Otherwise, all they'd have to do is troll bit-torrent for content, right?
Or are they already doing that?

[rkistler]

Just one question:
How does all this Streaming Video fit in with the talk about BANDWIDTH LIMITATIONS that nearly every broadband provider seems to be either implementing or at least considering?

Have not paid attention to amount of data downloaded for a long time now - but it appears more and more likely that that will again become a concern.

Or is this simply not likely to become a "real world" issue?

Thoughts?

[Chris Gohlke]

Excellent point. Especially when my internet provider is also my cable provider. I dropped most of their premium channels when I started with Blockbuster and might consider scaling back more when I go to Netflix and have so much stuff available on demand. If they can't be paid for being a content provider, they might at least try to recoup some of it in bandwitdh fees.

[Phillip Dyson]

This is exciting news. I was just about to try to install the SageTV Neflix plugin. But I can wait for this.