instant movie
So lately my roommate and I have been taking advantage of Netflix's "watch it now" feature. It is a great idea, and works surprisingly well for what it is. The movie is streamed directly to your Windows-compatible computer, and usually starts after only a minute or two of buffering. The video and sound quality aren't bad, and the picture looks much better on my roommate's monitor than it does on the awful and ancient VHS-compatible television that came with the trailer. You can add subtitles (for those frequently depressing foreign films that appear to be the staple diet of outlandishly classy graduate students living in squalor), and fast-forwarding really isn't much more than selecting a section slightly farther ahead in the stream and waiting for the buffer to reload. I'm not sure if the system will handle six-channel surround sound, or an HD-signal, but the future is coming.
Given the convenience of this model, I am fairly certain that this will eventually supplant traditional hard-media as a form of temporary distribution. Discs and the like will remain in one format or another for more permanent storage of media... but the ease and quality by which film could be distributed over legitimate channels may eventually grow to compete with those currently offered by the free pirate networks. Any media company not working on a method to distribute their content through such a mechanism is taking the slow road to extinction.
Which is not to say that there are not hiccups or problems with the extant system. My roommate and I are kind of borrowing our network signal from a neighbor, and streaming video does seem to take up a chunk of the bandwidth. That, and if your access is interrupted by any of a number of third-world power and cable failures that seem to plague Miami and Homestead with frightening regularity, you may lose your place in the film and spend your Netflix minutes reloading the same film twice.
Apple provokes further personal irritation. Apparently they consider Netflix a competitor to the digital distribution of film that their iTunes network could provide, and as such have not made it any easier for Netflix programmers to design a platform-independent video-player. Time will tell if this competitive strategy works or not, but in the meantime it means that I have to use my roommate's computer or boot mine up with Boot Camp.
