Fighting for Hearts and Minds, Well At Least living Rooms
The announcement yesterday that Netflix has partnered with LG to integrate its streaming service into their hardware is a significant step in the acceptance of Internet Television.
I have been using their streaming service since it came out and dedicated an older pc to streaming content off my incoming shared T-1 connection to our living room plasma, which has been respectable quality for viewing content on the fly. That this is a process many consumers will not be interested or even capable of, the pending integration with LG is an important step in taking lean-forward content to a lean-back environment with ease of use that has been missing to date.
Comments
I rejoined Netflix recently and gave this a shot on my HTPC. A couple thoughts.
1) They REALLY need to create custom integration with Media Center/Xbox-extender. Other hardware partners like LG are fine, but the Xbox already has massive distribution and overlaps with Netflix's core streaming audience.
2) The streaming quality is surprisingly nice. Almost DVD quality for the few movies I've watched. I've got a 5mbps cable connection and most movies were buffered within 10-15 seconds. I like the bookmarking aspect too in case you have to stop watching a movie.
3) The library is embarrassingly bad. I realize they don't want to undercut DVD rentals, but it's almost as if they sought out their 6,000 weakest titles for inclusion in this. I browsed the entire catalog to bookmark things for later viewing and only found a couple dozen that I might be interested in watching. They don't have to put new releases on here, but they definitely need to beef this area up.
Posted by: RS | January 27, 2008 12:57 PM
I agree completely they need to migrate to Xbox ASAP as well as other platforms.
The quality is surprisingly good as I output from a dedicated pc to our large screen...am more then happy with any trade off in quality for instant access.
While I agree you are not going to see first-run titles, perhaps a difference in tastes or age :-) might account for me finding a few more titles worth watching...but I did have to hunt for them:
- Being There
- Seven Years in Tibet
- The Usual Suspects
- Dressed to Kill
- Network
There was an article that spoke to the need and perhaps inevitability for the studios to change their tiered access model to titles.
Posted by: Gilbert | January 30, 2008 9:26 AM