My wife and I are big Netflix fans. We don’t have cable TV, or Dish, or Direct, or any of the other ways of bringing broadcast television into the house. As an advocate for moving everything over to digital media, I do purchase the occasional movie or TV season from the iTunes store, but not with any consistency.
We’ve been Netflix users for about 3 years now, and have used the service to fully replace our Blockbuster membership. It seems a lifetime ago that I actually went into a store to rent a movie or video game. Now we watch streaming movies online.
We’ve even considered paying for 2 memberships, because God forbid I should dare to interrupt her 6 season-long Northern Exposure streak with a South Park episode… I digress.
Arguing over the movie queue aside, Netflix’s Instant Queue product is one of the coolest innovations to come around in a long time. (If you’re not yet hip to streaming movies on your computer, click here to find out more about this). Headlines were made in 2008 when Roku released their set-top boxes, which connect to your WiFi network to bring Netflix streaming movies to your television. I was never very impressed with the image quality delivered through a Roku box, thus purchasing one for myself wasn’t of much interest.
Just last week Netflix announced to its customers that they were now able to deliver their Instant Queue product to customers who own a Nintendo Wii. Naturally, we ordered the free Instant Streaming Wii CD right away. It arrived in 24 hours (of course, those little red packages are the most reliable thing the US Postal Service has ever seen) and setup took all of 3 minutes.
The process was simple:
1. Insert Instant Streaming Wii cd into the Wii disk drive
2. Click on the Netflix item in the menu.
3. Providing your Wii is already connected to your home’s network, it dials into Netflix and gets an authorization code for you
4. Visit http://netflix.com/wii and enter your authorization code.
5. Wait about 18 seconds.
That’s it. Now you can access all of the movies available for Instant Viewing.
I queued up Beetlejuice, as a quality test. Well, I was pleasantly surprised when the movie started playing within 10 seconds of my having selected it. Also, I was blown away to discover the video quality was a crisp and clear as a DVD would be. I was not expecting that quality level at all.
As a final test, I went into the movie controller, and advanced the movie up past the 1 hour mark, and was utterly shocked when the wait time was just under 6 seconds! You can’t even advance or rewind that quickly with a DVD!
I for one, am completely convinced that Netflix Instant Streaming is the way to go, and I’m stoked to have it in my living room now, instead of just on my computer.
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On another note, Netflix has what must be the coolest app available for the iPad. I set my iPad up on the kitchen counter, and watch streaming movies or TV episodes while I prepare dinner.
For those who are still asking out loud what on Earth is an iPad good for, here’s reason #47: Portable TV/Entertainment center. Duh.
Thanks for reading!
~ Chris
