Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

So I saw today on Slashdot that Netflix is offering streaming movies. It looks pretty cool because you don’t have to pay anything extra to get 18 hours of streaming content a month. You can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, until you hit 18 hours. I’m not sure if you can pay more to get more monthly hours or not, I’m sure that will be an option eventually.

This has, more than anything else, made me want to get some device (Apple TV, Xbox, etc) that will allow me to stream movies from my computer to the TV, preferably over a wireless connection. In the past (before today), I wasn’t all that interested in these solutions because I don’t have a huge library of movies, nor do I want to maintain a huge collection. Now that Netflix can host my collection for me, connecting my TV to my computer makes a lot more sense.

A couple questions still remain though.

• Is it possible to stream a netflix movie from my computer to the TV?  There is a special movie player that you have to use and I don’t know enough about streaming content from the computer to the TV to answer this.
• What’s the maximum quality we can achieve?  DVD?  HD?  It says that Netflix will detect your connection speed to determine the quality it can give you, but I would be willing to wait 10 – 15 minutes to buffer a higher quality movie.
• What’s the selection like?  The screencast above mentions that Netflix currently has ~1000 titles available.  I’m assuming that will continue to grow.

So we’ll see what happens, I’m not sure what it would cost to get a decent streaming solution from my computer to my TV, but hopefully I can get something eventually.