Netflix

January 5th, 2009

Part of our new financial cutbacks in our household included acquiring a Netflix account over the weekend. We won’t be buying DVDs, or going to the movies much this year. Adding a monthly subscription fee to our bills may seem counter-intuitive at first glance. The fee will be paid for by my giving up of my Morningstar premium service that costs about the same. So we are not going to be spending anything more for it, and we will be cutting out our DVD purchases for now.

My wife had been a Netflix customer for years, and enjoyed her experience immensely. I have heard nothing but good things about the service for years, and finally took the plunge this weekend. The bonus that convinced me to do so, is the new Netflix streaming ability that is now available on the X Box 360. This allows you to stream Netflix’s Watch Instantly content via the X Box, on your TV.

I was not familiar with this aspect of the service, so we decided to try it out. Once you download the Netflix software on the gaming console, you simply create a new Netflix account if you do not already have one. After a few minutes of going back and forth between the X Box and the computer all was ready to go.

You simply add a title from the Watch Instantly library, to your instant queue via Netflix’s website, and within seconds the title pops up on your Netflix screen on the X Box. It is a pretty neat setup really.

After watching a couple of movies, and becoming more familiar with the process, it became apparent to me, that this is just an OK setup. First, the video quality is not the greatest. It is not unwatchable, but it is certainly not as good as even a progressive scan DVD.

It is like watching decent quality video via the internet. The first movie we watched, had a shuttering problem. The video had a very slight shutter to it throughout. Again, it was not unwatchable, but it did irritate me a bit.

The shuttering was not a problem on any of the other movies we streamed. The picture quality was not awesome by any means, but it was adequate. Fortunately most of the available titles, aren’t titles that one really cares about seeing in high definition anyway.

This unfortunately leads to the second, and possibly bigger problem with streaming Netflix movies. The selection kind of sucks. There are supposedly twelve thousand possibilities, but we struggled to find content that was interesting. There are not hardly any new titles, and the titles that are available are generally not the best. It states this on their website, and I am on a free trial at the moment, so no great loss, just disappointing really.

It is a neat bit of geeky tech, but not of great use. As a value-added service from Netflix, sure it is worthwhile. If one was looking at getting Netflix just for this service, I would advise against it.

We received our first DVD from Netflix very promptly after adding it to our queue. It worked flawlessly, and was very easy to repackage, and put back in the mail. This aspect of the service is going to be a wonderful thing it seems. They have a massive catalog of movies and TV shows to chose from.

Categories: Entertainment, Tech | Tags: movies