Last month, while I finally had some free time, I took advantage of the Netflix “Watch It Now” service and quickly used up my 9 hours in just a few days.
Actually, a little more than 9 hours - if you had at least 1 minute left you could start any movie and watch it uninterrupted and then you’d be out of minutes. But if you started the movie, stopped it and wanted to come back you couldn’t do it.
Anyway, I was looking forward to my time resetting on the 13th, which it did.
But TODAY, I get an email from Netflix saying:
No more time restrictions! I can pay $9/mo and watch hours and hours of movies (albeit mostly b-movies and documentaries) online!
Awesome for me, because I have my computer hooked up to my TV so it’s not like I’m watching movies hunched over my desk.
Thought I’d share this for anyone who has Netflix and doesn’t know.
I was speculating with a friend today as to why they’d do this. My thought is that they’re not getting a good enough feel for how popular the service is by restricting hours. People might be letting their hours lapse because they want to “save” them “just in case.” So Netflix doesn’t know how popular the service truly can be unless they let everyone watch whatever they want.
It’s GOT to be costing them a lot of moolah in bandwidth - even if they have a spectacular compression algorithm.
I had Netflix for a few months and used this service. After finishing “The Office” that first month, there was nothing else that interested me, so all of those hours went to waste. Every couple of weeks or so, I would browse the new releases, and still nothing would catch my eye. I watched a couple of movies while sick in bed, but there were just so many that looked horrible, that I’d never heard of, or just weren’t my taste.
I find it surprising that there was such a demand for unlimited access to these streaming movies that Netflix decided to open it up entirely.
I know there are a lot of people into foreign films, documentaries and B-movies, but I didn’t realize I was in such a minority.
I watch a lot of the documentaries online. I usually have them playing in the background while I’m doing other things online. I enjoy a lot of the Netflix documentaries, but don’t often want to waste a “real” rental with a 50 minute documentary dvd.
I found this out last night when I went to see how much instant viewing I had left. Where there used to be a counter showing me such was now just a list of movies I’d watched.
“Goddammit,” I thought. They’re trying to make it harder for me to find out my useage! Took me a few minutes of clicking to find out they had made it unlimited. I got the email today.
I was a big fan of their Watch Now service – that’s how I got hooked on The Office, and there were lots of other fun videos, such as Yes Minister and more obscure documentaries. Liberal, if you haven’t seen YM you really should.
Unfortunately, about five months ago my browser suddenly froze every time I loaded up a video. IE, Firefox, doesn’t matter – load up a movie, wait for Netflix to check my download speed, and boom! Frozen city.
This was suspiciously concurrent with my downloading the allegedly improved iTunes for Vista. (ITunes kept freezing when playing videos as well.) I never did get iTunes to work with Vista, and now I can’t watch Netflix either. I really wanted to start watching the UK Office too.
Thank God for Amazon’s UnBox service. Unlike Netflix, it costs extra … but the videos play like a dream.
I suppose I can just try it and see but what is the interface like? Can you pause, go back, etc like watching other streaming video? And special software to download? How smooth is the viewing over a cable modem, lagwise?
The interface is pretty simple, sort of like YouTube. Yes you can pause and go forward…not sure about back because I never looked.
You can make it full screen and the controls go away. I actually have a hard time getting the controls to come BACK. Seems like clicking on the fullscreen makes it pause.
I had to get Windows Media Player 11 to make it work. I hate WMP 11 but it just would not work with WMP 10 even though it said it would. But I have a not-so-legit version of Windows so it could have been my fault that it did not work with WMP 10.
I watch mine on a machine with a PCI wi-fi connection to a cable modem/router, and there’s no lag. Out of the 9+ hours I watched, I had one that kept pausing on me (on Christmas eve though, maybe it was full up?)
Anybody know how to browse the selection available for watching online? I went to netflix.com and clicked on “Browse Our Instant Watching Selection”, but all I get is a display of about 20 selections. I can’t seem to find a way to look through all 6000 of the selections supposedly available.
This is very cool because even without their entire catalog, still there are tons of movies on there that I wouldn’t waste a trip to the video store for, or a queue selection, but which I wouldn’t mind seeing. So I’m happy.
A poster mentioned Firefox, above. I don’t believe that Netflix will work at all with Firefox. IE6+ only apparently. For this reason, I haven’t used it yet. I just can’t bring myself to try to cope with the IE interface and other problems.
It kind of tees me off that I have to use IE on XP to watch the movies, and FireFox isn’t allowed.
The movie selection is very slim.
The picture quality is pretty darned good, much better than YouTube videos IMHO. Full screen playback looks very nice. Go stream The Karate Kid, and skip to the final fight – lots of motion, quite a bit of color, lots of compression hazards, and it looks pretty good!
The seek time kind of bites – about 10-20 seconds to seek in a movie. Which I understand, but it is annoying.
No chapter markers, no way to skip to a waypoint in the movie! Jeez Netflix, just clone the chapers from the DVD!
Finally: Its pretty cool that you can just stream several thousand movies, no extra charge if you have a NetFlix subscription. I hope they expand the selection and features.
So the picture quality is “good” - how good? I have Netflix but have never tried the Watch It Now. If we put it into our TV set, is it good enough to watch that way? TV quality? DVD quality? Will it drive me nuts or not?
I’m sure it’s SD rez, but blown up to my 23" monitor, it looks pretty good on all of the 2 movies I’ve watched so far. I don’t know if it varies from movie to movie.
Quick check – I just watched the opener of Ghost Busters – definitely SD rez. But not bad. Below DVD quality, but quite acceptable. Again, I’ve watched just a couple of shows so far, YMMV.
I really wanted to start watching the UK Office too.