A few weeks back Netflix announced a service to subscribers where they could watch select movies directly from their website. The article stated that they Netflix would roll this out to very few subscribers per month until June, where they expected all current subscribers would have this ability. I checked my account daily to see if I was the one of the chosen few, and a couple days later and to my surprise I was. Clicking on the link the service activated, downloaded a player for my browser, and added the “Watch Now” tab on the top of the website for easy access. The process was fast and easy, I barely had to wait 30 seconds for everything to install and I was ready to watch my first movie.
The service now offers it’s subscribers movie time equal to the dollar amount you pay for your subscription. If you have the $18 package, you get 18 hours of time to watch per month from their website. $24 = 24 hours etc. This does not count against your movies you get per month either. This is in addition to the 2 3 or 4 picks you have at one time. The service scans your internet connection to determine the quality of the movies. In my case it picked the lowest quality since I only have 768 download.
Glancing over the front page you you are given the option of picks Netflix thinks you might like, movies form your queue and various picks from different genre’s. I started to search for a movie, but there on the front page was Zach Galifianakis Live, a movie I had waiting in my queue. I hit the play button and was directed to the browser / player screen. Once the player screen pops up it downloads the file and depending on the movie, it queue’s up for a few minutes, or starts up with in seconds. In this case it started about 10 seconds after I hit play. I was very surprised to see this. With only having 768 download, I expected to wait about 20 or 30 minutes before I could watch it without running into buffer issues along the way. I played the movie straight through and had absolutely no problems with it catching up to the download as I watched. The movie was actually finished downloading about 30 minutes into it, and never hiccuped once.
I have since watched about 5 different movies from the service, and only had to wait once for about 10 minutes for the movie to queue up far enough that I wouldn’t run into problems. The service is very nice overall and has very nice quality even at the lowest setting. I was most excited to for this service because I have my PC connected to my home theater set up. Being able to pick from my Netflix selection and watch right away is perfect. The service on my home theater set up looked and sounded great too. If Netflix ever offers the rumored set top box for this service they will have an even stronger grip on the online movie business. Cant wait to see what’s next. As for now, go get Netflix and try for yourself.
Jeff Standley
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