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Netflix offers streaming movies to subscribers |
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Written by Kacey Green
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Tuesday, 16 January 2007 |
ArsTechnica reports: 1/16
My family used to subscribe to Netflix, if I were a Netflix subscriber I'd probably use this feature to watch movies as my PC handles all of my multimedia (its a PVR.) If they had this service when my family was subscribing we probably would have used it to preview movies to watch in our living room. Its an interesting concept and I'm curious as to how Netflix plans to get the content to the living room in the future.
Netflix subscribers will soon get access to movies delivered over the Internet, finally allowing the company to live up to its name. For those with the bandwidth, this is a nice (and free) extra, but users with slow connections will want to stick with DVDs.
The new service streams movies to Windows PCs instead of downloading them first. This has the dual benefit of 1) appeasing content owners who worry that full downloads of their movies might be cracked and 2) providing instant gratification to customers in need of a cinematic fix. Netflix claims that, with the aid of a one-time browser applet download, customers can begin watching films within 15 seconds of clicking the "play" button.
Streaming high-quality video with little buffering requires a fast connection. Netflix says that its new technology throttles the streaming speed based on available bandwidth. Users will need a minimum of 1Mbps to watch films, but these will be far below DVD quality. 3Mbps connections are required to watch movies in their native resolution (no support is currently planned for high-definition content). With the increasing ubiquity of broadband, this should pose no problem for most power users, but plenty of 768Kbps DSL connections (and slower) still dot the landscape.
Kacey Green
www.GRLT.com
"Tech with a twist of lime!"
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 16 January 2007 )
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