netflix Alright so I started up my Netflix subscription again recently, and despite still not having received my first movie from them (Grandma's Boy, in case you're interested) I did have a chance to try out some of their "instant" streaming movies.  The selection isn't that great but the two I've watched so far are Death Proof and Helvetica.  Two decent movies.  The important part though is whether or not these instant streaming movies are worth it or not.

If you could only get on-demand movies through Netflix I'd say no.  However, since with a subscription as cheap as Netflix's  2 disc at-a-time plan you get unlimited viewing of the instant movies it's pretty nice.  I'm constantly looking for something to listen to or watch whenever I'm behind my computer for whatever reason, so being able to set up a movie on one screen while I work on the other is pretty nice.  The quality isn't amazing, but it's not so bad you'll notice most of the time.  If you're used to online videos (things like Revision 3 or Mahalo Daily) you'll be at home.  The movies play right in your browser, and can go full-screen without taking too much of a hit as far as quality goes.

netflixbrowser I do have two problems with the service though.  First off, it only works in IE.  What?  It doesn't really bother me that much because with a movie going in IE it's not like I'm going to be trying to browse in the same window.  It just doesn't make sense to me.  Everyone uses Firefox, so why limit us to IE?  It's kind of annoying because I'll be looking for a movie in Firefox then I'll hit play, after which I'll be greeted with a nice "you're running the wrong browser for this" page.  So I have to copy and paste the URL to the movie I was going to watch into IE, and then I'm good to go.  It's not a huge problem or a deal-breaker by any means, but like I said it just doesn't make sense to me.  This is 2008.  Make it work in multiple browsers.

Next up is the relatively small amount of movies they have that work with on-demand viewing.  As of today when I'm writing this there are a little over 7,000 movies available for instant viewing, most of which are older classics or TV shows.  There also seems to be a lot of documentaries.  I suppose that makes sense because you don't need a huge amount of quality in the output when watching a documentary.   Hopefully they'll add some newer movies such as Grindhouse, which I think might be the newest movie they have in the instant viewing library.  We'll see.

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