Netflix streaming has been around for just over a year now and has gone leaps and bounds since its first creation. This is our review of the netflix instant streaming service as of Februrary 2009. For those who have been living under a rock for the last few years, Netflix offers a wide variety of movies that you can watch instantly on their website. This is a free addition to the already low monthly fee of the regular netflix service.
When signing up for a free trial (which you should, because… well… it’s free) you are given a few payment options. I picked the 2 dvds at a time plan, which includes unlimited rentals each month, unlimited streaming, and we added blu-ray rentals which totals out to $15/month (after our discounted trial month). There are many more options both cheaper and more expensive as well. Immediately after signing up for our account we were allowed to start streaming from the “watch instantly” section. You can browse through the genre’s or search just as you would for renting dvds. Before we got started on the streaming we quickly added a few newer blu-rays to our queue so they would get sent in the meantime. Here is the breakdown of the streaming service.
Content Available
Not every movie and tv series is available to watch instantly. This has been the main concern with most people over the last year but the selection has grown quite a bit. Every day they are adding titles to the streaming service and it has grown to something like 13,000+ now. This includes both new and old movies and tv shows. You can watch up to date Heroes and The Office episodes, or you can watch older stuff like the original Knight Rider. The selection is growing much faster recently and we can probably expect to stream just about everything within the next year at this rate.
Picture and Sound
The best I have seen in streaming. When you start up a video the picture quality might not seem very high quality, but that is because the netflix player is checking your connection speed so they can adjust the picture and sound quality accordingly. Give it about 30-60 seconds and it will look and sound fantastic if you have a decent broadband connection. Check the screenshot below to see how clear the picture is.
Loading and Buffering
This has also been very impressive. You would expect netflix to get a little slow in the evening from how much traffic their site gets. Now that everyone is streaming movies and tv shows you would expect it to have problems. This is not the case at all. Even at prime time in the central U.S. there is no slow down at all, the video never pauses to buffer and it loads immediately, I was VERY impressed by this.
Final Thoughts
Netflix is a must have. I couldn’t believe how impressed I was by just this streaming service and I plan to keep it through the trial. I enjoy watching the blu-ray versions of new movies while still having a huge selection of things to watch online while I’m waiting for the mailing turn around. For those that still don’t have a media center PC on their TV, Netflix also has a streaming box you can hook up to your tv and stream directly to it. They are also adding netflix streaming to a wide variety of devices in the future, support has already been added for xbox 360 owners and soon you might be able to stream right to your phone. Again, this isn’t something to pass up, take advantage of the trial offers while they are around. Here is a link to a free trial for those that are interested.