Netflix Streaming Videos

A few weeks ago, I read that Netflix was slowly rolling out a program allowing its customers, 250,000 at a time until June, to watch streaming videos online, sort of free. And as of early today - or I guess I should say yesterday - I finally got it.

Once again, Netflix has rewritten the rules — this time, of the online movie-rental game. The company has done away with expiration dates, copy protection and multi-megabyte downloads. That’s because you don’t actually download any of Netflix’s movies; instead, they “stream” in real time from the Internet to your computer. [...]

Netflix has also done away with per-movie fees — in fact, there are no additional fees for watching movies online at all. Instead, the Netflix service is free if you’re already a Netflix DVD-by-mail subscriber. When you log in to Netflix.com, you see a new tab called Watch Now. It opens what looks like a duplicate set of the company’s usual excellent movie-finding and movie-recommending tools, except that you now see two buttons beneath each movie’s icon: Rent and Play. [...]

Even more startling: Your movie watching is measured by time, not by individual movie title or by individual viewing.

The hours of movie watching you get each month depends on which DVD-by-mail plan you have. You get one hour of online movies per dollar of your monthly fee. So if you pay $6 a month (for the one-DVD-at-a-time plan), you can watch six hours of movies online; if you pay $18 (for the three-DVD plan), you can gorge yourself on 18 hours of online movies. And so on.

The movie streamed in fairly high-resolution, but was choppy. I'm hoping that's just a result of the new technology and that it's something they'll be perfecting soon. Still, despite its problems, the system is brilliant and for so many reasons: if you can't wait and must watch it right away, if you're not sure it's worth it and want to give the the first few minutes a shot before committing to a rental, if you're bored at work, or if your girlfriend has had enough of your westerns.

By the way, the movie I watched was Street Fight - an Oscar-nominated documentary about the 2002 Newark mayoral race between Cory Booker and Sharpe James - and I highly recommend it.