Netflix prepares for shift to streaming
 

Netflix Inc. (NFLX) doesn't believe the DVD-rental market will dry up anytime soon. But by the time discs do fade away, the company wants to make sure customers are already accustomed to using its service to download movies and TV shows from the Web.

How many of us rent movies from places like Blockbuster?

How many of us rent movies from places like Netflix?

How many of us get movies streamed over the Internet?

Let's just say that I have no plan or inclination to to buy any disc based digital media players for home entertainment. Blu-Ray players may have won the battle against HD-DVD, but in the long run, what are its prospects?

I haven't bet on any of those horses yet, either.

Entertainment media, like DVD or CD, is really just another form of software and the distribution channels for software has been moving to 'net distribution for years.

As with most technologies . . . the porn industry has already demonstrated that the business model works for digital distribution.

Somebody once said that if not for porn, the Internet's commercial application would not have be realized nearly as quickly.

Funny. They sure do get a lot of bad press considering how much they've done to advance civilization . . . .

I've been streaming Netflix through my home theater for a couple of months now. Works very well but no 5.1 yet.

What's "5.1?"

Oh, are you talking about the surround sound?

I've got Netflix, and watch some of the streaming stuff. As of right now, the stuff they stream for the most part is crap, but monitors are certainly going to be capable of every bit as good picture and will be of decent size soon enough.

Yep, I mean 5.1 surround sound. Pic looks good. I'm streaming it to a 60" plasma.

Yeah, hardware and software seem always to be in a sort of leap frog realationship to each other. Each keeps the other going because the software makes the hardware obsolete. Then the hardware surpasses it and has all this extra, unused bandwidth that the programmers find a way to fill up.

I just watched my first movie from Netflix last night. We rented it in Blue Ray and I was pretty happy with how quick it got here. We have also watched some streaming movies via our X-Box 360 on the 50" HDTV and that worked very well too.

I think it's worth 9.99 per month for the 1 disc at a time plan with Blue Ray option.

I just sent the first disc back today, so I'll be able to tell how many movies we'll really be able to watch per month once the next movie off our list gets here. There's plenty of titles in the streaming library that we haven't seen though, so we could be watching multiple movies every night.:cool:

I noticed that there are also 7.1 systems, too. How does that work? Does it interpolate two more channels of sound, or are they already in there?

How long does it take to get a movie over the Internet? Does it come in something equivalent to a zip file?

I'm impressed with Netflix, if I put an item in the mail the new movie is sometimes mailed the same day and always the following day. I don't know how they do it but they do a fine job.

It helps to be living near a Netflix distribution center for fast turnarounds.

Its magic.... :D



I stream Netflix to my Media Center, the quality is good, but waiting for 5.1.




We have BlueRay Player on the Plasma and a PS3 in the media room. I had a conversation with someone a year and a half ago about the switch to just having everything stream to you. We looked at the fact that internet speeds are getting faster, while at the same time the service is getting cheaper.

Anyone remember when DVDs came out?