Streaming Movies: The Next Frontier
February 9th, 2009 by Chris M
The line between home theater components and computer hardware has become hazy in the past few years. With many households on high-speed internet, manufacturers are making devices that have an RJ45 ethernet connection on the rear jack pack. Potentially, the most exciting aspect of networkable A/V components is the ability to stream video over the internet straight to your existing television. Netflix has teamed up with a couple of manufacturers allowing its customers to stream video directly. All you need is a subscription to their $8.99 monthly DVD rental plan, high speed internet, and a compatible device. Currently, this service will work with the Tivo HD & Tivo HDXL, the Samsung BDP2500, and the LG BD300. Once all the hardware is in place, Netflix customers have access to over 12,000 movies & TV shows.
I purchased a Tivo HD through OneCall.com over a year ago and have enjoyed the benefits ever since. To begin taking advantage of the streaming service through Netflix took only 3 simple steps. First, I signed up for the Netflix $8.99 package (1 DVD at a time and unlimited streaming). Next, I clicked on “On Demand” on my Tivo menu and follows the links to activate the streaming capability. lastly, I logged onto Netflix and added 8 movies to my “instant” que. Initially i was a bit confused on which movies I could stream to my Tivo, but eventually i leared that I could either click the “watch instantly” tab at the top of Netflix’s web site and pick any movie there, or just look for the movies that had the “Play/ADD” link (movies that you cannot stream will just say “Add”).
I can’t tell you how happy I am with this new streaming service. When the movie first begins to play there is a status bar which shows how good the quality will be. Some internet connections may give you lower quality during peak hours, but I have yet to watch a video stream that was of extremely poor quality. There were a few movies that had lip sync issues but I think this was mainly due to peak hour problems through my internet provider. When i selected the same movie later, there were no sync issues. If I had to stop watching in the middle of the movie, I could beging again later exactly where I left off. Many of the movies I chose were movies I wanted to see but were lower on my priority list. There are also a fair amount of family and kid movies available. This becomes very important here in the Pacific Northwest when the weather turns cold and my existing kid movie collection becomes stale. Hopefully we will see HD content with 7.1 surround streams in the future.
