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Netflix on Demand

Posted Aug 29th, 2007

I have been a happy Netflix subscriber for several years now. This is of course the age of 84-inch high-def plasma TVs, Tivo, and 800-channel cable/satellite channel lineups. I’ll spare you the tales of my Oliver Twist-like youth of audiovisual impoverishment, where we had 3, count ‘em, 3 channels. And if you weren’t home when it was on, you missed it, brother. To fully avail myself of everything that I could plug into on the boob tube I’d have to quit my job and lock myself in a room.

Which is why Netflix suits me so perfectly. Three DVDs at a time is about all I might ever want to watch at one time. The turn around on the little red envelopes is 3, 4 days tops. Everything I might ever want to watch on cable, broadcast, or in the theatre comes out on DVD soon enough. And at $17 a month, it’s at least a third of what cable would cost me.

But every once in a while, say after a rainy weekend, I find myself waiting at the mailbox for the next couple of DVDs, wishing there was another option.

Now there is… Netflix on Demand. The idea is simple–instead of getting the DVD in the mail, you can watch movies or TV episodes on your PC over your broadband connection. Nothing to recieve, nothing to send back. Instant gratification.

The nice thing is that this service is included with your Netflix subscription at no additional cost. There are a couple of limiting factors, however.

Quality is not DVD quality–but it’s not bad, and certainly watchable. I watched on a standard laptop over standard DSL connection, and even with the picture expanded to full screen, the picture was at least TV quality, and there were no jerks or stops and starts in the playback of the movies.
Selection is limited. About 4000 titles so far, so it’s likely that if you have something in particular that you wanted to see, it might not be in the catalog yet. There is a fair mix of classic TV episodes and old movies along with some newer B-list movies.
Your don’t have unlimited access to this service–Netflix gives you one hour per month for each dollar you spend in your monthly plan. Mine is 17 bucks, so I get 17 hours per month of Netflix on Demand.

By itself, Netflix on Demand is unpolished and incomplete. As an additional service added to my Netflix account, it’s a great deal. For movies and programs I am very interested in, I still want to get the full DVD, along with all the extra features and picture quality. But sometimes I just want to watch something, and being able to choose and watch program on a whim, anywhere I have my laptop, is a tempting feature.

Even more important is recognizing the potential of this kind of service to replace not only the general Netflix model of doing business, but for this idea to overtake the airwave/cable/satellite model of audiovisual delivery. This is a fairly bold claim–there are dead video-on-demand services that go back decades. The best cable can do now is pay-per-view, a model limited to high-profile events like boxing matches.

But imagine if the flaws of Netflix on demand were addressed–the main ones are picture quality and size of the library. Technology marches on–well, actually, at times it sprints–so it’s not hard to imagine Netflix on Demand serving up Blu-Ray or other similar quality formats from a library of 40,000 or even 400,000 titles. At that point, what advantage is there to cable/satellite/broadcast? The point of TiVo is to record what you want to watch automatically so you can watch it whenever you want. What if this were possible without the TiVo?