Review: Netflix Instant Streaming Video Service

"Fantastic," I said as I got the email announcing the new service.  Finally, users are able to watch movies on the internet legally.  This is a major achievement for the industry.  Technical aspects aside, it has taken too long to address the issue of movie piracy.  People aren't downloading movies because they are trying to break the law or because they are too cheap to buy the movie.  They download movies because the technology is readily available and it's very convenient.  It took the industry a few years to catch up to that.

I'm a Firefox user and the first thing I noticed when I tried to watch a film off Netflix was my incompatible browser.  They've traditionally been very good at cross-browser support so I was a little surprised but I switched over to IE just to make it work.  Once I opened the site up in IE, I had the option to watch the movie instantly so I tried it out.  At first it was just an error and it prompted me to download a few things.  Initially, I had assumed that they had implemented the service as a Flash player.  That approach would make sense to me because not only would it allow support for PC and Mac in all browsers but it would facilitate any DRM and custom codec mechanism of choice.  This is not how Netflix opted to go.  Attn Netflix CTO:  Give me a call if you like.  We can work out something more accessible.  I know people.  Seriously.

Netflix implemented their video player using Windows Media Player 11.  For the growing Mac OSX base, that translates to SOL.  For those of you with an illegitimate version of Windows XP, it also means you can't use it because you can't upgrade to WMP11 without WGA.  Why would they do this?  I'm sure it's part of a deal with the MPAA.  If it's not, then I don't quite understand the solution because it's not reaching the growing Mac and Linux user base.  Either way I had to download 2 sets of components and upgrade my media player to WMP11 to be able to use the service.

Once connected, it determines your connection speed and sets the video resolution to match.  That's a good thing.  What it translates to is most people with broadband will be able to watch the movies.  People with a slow connection don't get it quite as clear and people with a fast connection get the highest video quality.  I'm assuming that applies to sound as well but I wasn't able to observe that.  What I thought was interesting though was that the video looked far worse than any DivX movie I've watched at the same bitrate.  It was pulling about 200kB/s to my laptop to achieve that.  DivX encoded content looks near DVD quality at that rate.  This was nowhere near as good, but it was still watchable.

Currently they claim to have 5,000 movies available in the library but they are seriously lacking when it comes to current titles.  I couldn't find most of the films I was looking for and many are big name.  I'm assuming they are going to be improving their selection in the future.

Overall my first experience was rocky.  I don't like the choice of technology used because while it works for me, it doesn't reach a large group of users and I don't believe it delivers the best end user experience.  The video choices are lacking right now but there are still some gems in the collection.  I haven't used it enough to be able to really complain about the DRM used, but if I know DRM and I know the MPAA and I know Microsoft, it's sure to give users a headache.

My wishlist for Netflix:

1. Flash-based player
2. Higher quality audio and video
3. Better selection
4. More lenient DRM allowing for watching downloaded films offline

Kudos to Netflix for:

1. Starting the service at all
2. Having a large pipe to deliver the necessary bandwidth
3. Offering it for free to existing customers

I applaud Netflix for initiating and providing a usable online on-demand video service.  While I had technical difficulty getting everything working, it does work and I can watch movies.  I look forward to their next major release of the service but until then will be trying to make the best of what's there right now.