RSSNetflix Offers Online Movie Streaming
By Ed Oswald | Published January 16, 2007, 11:00 AM
Subscribers of the movie service Netfilx will gain the capability to stream movies to their PCs. About 1,000 films and television shows would be made available through the service, which will be rolled out to current customers over the next six months.
Netflix is facing an ever more competitive Blockbuster, which recently added new rental options to lure customers away from its bigger rival. The streaming feature will be provided at no additional cost above the standard monthly charge.
Netflix has plans to continue to expand the number of movies available, and says it will eventually support other platforms, such as the television or mobile phone. Mac OS users cannot currently use the service, as it requires Windows.
"While mainstream consumer adoption of online movie watching will take a number of years due to content and technology hurdles, the time is right for Netflix to take the first step," CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement.
Customers would not be able to purchase videos from the service, as the company has indicated that is has no interest in that market. Rather, it would focus on rental, where the downloader has a set period of time to view a download.
When a customer begins a download, they would almost immediately be able to begin viewing the movie. Downloading of a browser applet would be required to viewed the movie, and quality would be scaled to the speed of a user's connection.
For example, a one-megabit per second connection would result in quality equivalent to Netflix's current online previews, while a three-megabit per second connection would result in near-DVD quality video.
Depending on their monthly plan, subscribers would be given a set number of hours for online viewing. For example, those on the $5.99 USD plan would get six hours of movie streaming, while those on the $17.99 USD plan would get 18 hours.
I was wondering what happened to this plan.
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this is actually appealing to me with it going up to 3mb. most other services are 300kb like real player
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How many people have 3mbps quality connections? Seems like you'd need FIOS or similar service...
Oh well can't blame them for getting ahead of the trends and trying to get the bugs worked out before the masses are ready.
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I have the 8mbps plan from Comcast, and my monthly bandwidth tests top out around 7mbps...
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shut up idiot, my cable was 5mb for the past 3 years and is now 10mb
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And you do realize that its not guaranteed at that speed.
Its going to be interesting to see how well this works once its available.
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Comcast pushed my base service in Howard County Maryland to 16MB as a plan to compete and test against Verisons FiOS, so rock out with the quickness. ;D I could deal with this new netflix service, and if it gets great reviews, I might get back on board with them.
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No Mac support? Oh noes, class action lawsuit time! Call out the Apple zealot Brigade!
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New approach in the entertainment sector
all the best
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Oh boy, streaming video, hooray another big company that doesn't understand video on the web.
Those that get it let you download first and watch later, then even the bandwidth weenies can enjoy quality playback.
-Christian Blackburn
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it can be copied easier that way so they only allow real time streaming. what do you know
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