Is Netflix Poised To Dominate Broadband Video?

I am not a netflix customer myself but they are taking innovative approaches to remain competitive in the marketplace.

On a side note, with blockbuster slumping, I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix took over blockbuster for the retail store space and customers.

I am a long time Netflix customer. I have their Roku streaming box and now also have it via HD TiVo. It rocks.

Brick and mortar video rental is over. Netflix would not have any use for Blockbuster's (dwindling) remaining locations or stock. Customers are easy to get.

The only thing holding this back is the MPAA. Should ISPs start intentionally interfering with streaming services all regulatory hell will break loose. You think "net neutrality" is a big topic. Try "tortuous interference with interstate commerce".

I agree. I spent about 5-6 hours the other night streaming movies to my Xbox 360, both SD and HD, and it worked flawlessly. I only have a 720p TV, but their SD content looks GREAT and it autoscaled to fill the screen.

All in all it's a very good service, especially for being in its infancy.

Where is the HD content with Netflix streaming? I've been using the service since the xbox xperience update and haven't seen anything.

It's under the HD label.

I third. We Netflix and it's awesome on XBOX360. Microsoft finally did something right.

I became fed up with AT&T in 04 and pledged to never write another check to them. Time Warner wasn't much better so I decided to look for other options. Here's where I am now I'm proud to say:

Free over the air antenna (HD) (download most shows from network websites now)
$50 per month to Time Warner for internet
$7 per month for Xbox live
$7 per month for netflix and stream movies.

As opposed to 2004 when I was spending
$70 per month to AT&T for ADSL and forced bundled phone line (I have cell.)
$90 to cable company for TV expanded package and HD and 3 boxes and line item 45 blah blah.

There's a couple of TV shows that I miss that were on cable but most of the networks are getting with the program and putting their content online. And the old fashioned rabbit ears HD is so much better than cable's HD.
When we first unplugged cable TV and went to the internet for content it was sparse. Now it's plentiful and growing every month.

Exactly what I was thinking. I've already got a plan of action in place for if AT&T ever tries to pull that crap with my Netflix streaming. Personally, I'm kind of hoping it happens (not locally, but nationally), that way all hell will break loose and all these ISPs won't know what hit them when they receive a good truckload of lawsuits over unfair competition.

Ok, I'm game. What is your plan?

What would stop them from just saying the ISP's network is private? Where does it say they have to allow access to anything? (just curious)

Well, they advertise Internet access. It would be a bit untruthful to not let you actually access the Internet. Last I checked Netflix, et. al. were Internet services.

The bigger deal is preventing someone from purchasing competing content. The cable boys have a huge incentive to muck this up because eventually it will replace cable TV entirely. Then there are the political ramifications of Interstate Commerce. Interfering with or surcharging third party streaming content delivery is very close to adding a "shopping fee" to Amazon when you don't shop through ISP links.

The fastest way to common carrier regulation for ISPs is to screw with this.

I think the way they'll pull this off is by arguing they don't interfere with any traffic of any kind.... they just charge you overage fees if you go over your Cap (10GB a month or whatever.)

Result is, if you seriously start watching a lot of Internet Video services (Via Netflix, VuDu, Hulu, or whatever) you get such a large "Internet Access" bill that you have to cut out your video watching. Thus they succeed in two ways: They block TV competition or 2) even if people go to the competition they still make bank off the charges.

Same here. I have the Roku (presently SD) and upgraded my DSL line recently to 10Mbps in anticipation of the HD upgrade for 'the little box'. My 3Mbps connection worked well if I forced full stream quality; the 10Mbps is cake, even on what used to be long initial buffering of forced stream speed.

But, yeah, cable ISPs will be the first to piss and moan, and the MPAA should get onboard and STFU.
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I don't know about Brick and mortar video rental being over for the following reasons.
1. It seems the popular move among ISP's now days is to impose ridiculous caps.

2. Most people would rather own the physical media

3. Most homes are unable to get the necessary download speeds to make it practical.

1. This is almost entirely pundit jabber in the US. Even Comcast's cap is not an issue. AT&T's doesn't really exist outside of a test.

2. Rental doesn't gain you ownership of physical media.

3. Three megabits does the job nicely. FYI that's more than what your cable company is using to get you each digital channel.

Blockbuster is dropping stores like flies all over this market (Chicagoland) and the ma and pa stores died awhile ago. Hollywood Video is limping along. There is not much happy news in this market.

Speak for your own country. Canadians with our miniscule caps and overuse charges have no other option but to go out and rent videos from the store.

Why would I speak for Canada? See my #1 above.

The already are interfering. It's called caps.

No evidence that those have affected anyone's video streaming here in the US though. Damages must occur before action can be taken...

The writing is on the wall. Most cable providers now offer some form of on demand movie service of which Netflix's offering will undermine. Caps are a perfect way to prevent this and is the primary reason caps are being pursued, contrary to what the ISPs have been telling us.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you entirely. This road leads straight to restraint-of-trade prosecution and heavy-handed regulatory action. However, the average Netflix movie uses about 2.5 gigabytes of bandwidth (3 megabits per second, 110 minute movie). Unless the caps are draconian that still leaves room for a lot of streaming. If they are set absurdly low enough to become an issue for casual users they will be very difficult to defend. Cable companies spend $millions on lawyers who I am sure know where that line lies.

The average movie is also in SD that is being streamed, so as more HD movies become available and more people stream those movies, the bandwidth increases quite a bit.

HD movies are in the 4-6GB range.

That is true, but the codecs are getting better and it is not a linear relationship. Your average "HD" channel on a cable system is streaming to you at less than 13 megabits and that is using older technology. I would expect a state of the art Internet HD streaming service to run around 5-6 megabits.

Probably less. I take all my Blu-Ray discs and convert them to 720p WMV9 AP (VC-1) at 6Mbps to 6.5Mbps and they look gorgeous. Since H.264 has better compression, my guess would be the actual bitrate would be much lower across the wire from Netflix. H.264 MPEG-4 looks GREAT as low as 2Mbps.

As a funny anecdote, I have a buddy with a 768Kbps Road Runner connection and he says NetFlix will kick the quality down on his stream until even on his SD TV, it looks blurry. I found it funny, but impressive, that he could even stream a movie at 768Kbps and even funnier that the quality becomes so bad it looks blurry on a SD TV.

The rate monitor in the device is pretty good but still has some bugs about what it thinks your connection can handle vs. what you could really push through. So far, though, the Roku box has not attempted to run at less than top speed on my six meg DSL.

There is still some refinement necessary but considering what it does for the money so far it is a home run.

I have to agree.

I am also a long time netflix customer and i also have a xbox 360. when i downloaded the netflix with my 360 i love the fact that i can watch movies on my tv instead of my computer.Cause they have done this i will stay a loyal customer

Comcast's 250GB cap doesn't bother me in the least. I've signed up for Netflix trial and have streamed about 30GB so far and was able to watch 3 movies and 1.5 box sets of CSI: Miami so far.

Quality is very good on my 8800/2200 line, and even buried with my computer doing stuff, my Netflix stream didn't miss a beat.

They deserve to rule the roost. All they need to do now is expand the streaming selection.

I think Amazons way of downloading to the machine is better, i havent had too good luck with netflix. Maybe if netflix allowed even partial downloading it would be better. The internet is not a QOS enviroment.

What speed connection do you have? Mine works fine (both Roku and TiVo) on six meg DSL.

On the TiVo even YouTube works great.

I've monitored it and an SD movie requires about 5Mbps for the majority of the movie. An HD movie gobbled up close to my maximum 15Mbps for quite a while during an HD stream.

I'm surprised by this. I have a 6MB DSL connection and it connects with HD quality every time it's available, both PC and TiVo. I can watch an ~43 minute HD show with no degradation, although I can't say if my HD quality is as high as yours. Maybe Netflix has different tiers of HD quality. It does look quite good, even though I can see pixelation on my 24" 1080p monitor (not my 720p HDTV though, probably since I sit far enough away).

Mine works fine, even when I had "only" a 10mbps connection.

I have 30 now via DOCSIS3.

The only time I had problems was when it initially launched on TiVo and their servers were overloaded.

Apart from that the only complaint I have is the lack of movies in HD. After watching a few Blu-Ray discs I really can't watch anything in SD anymore.

Is the lack of instant watchability for major releases. This is the only area where blockbuster has them beat. But as Netflix releases more and more on the instant watching, they'll keep chipping away at the reasons people going to Blockbuster.

After that point, they'll have beat Blockbuster in availability, speed of time to watch, and most importantly, price! Heck, you can even order a Domino's Pizza from your tivo!

Only had it a few days, locked it to high quality and it's awesome!

It uses about 250KB/sec over a 5 minute average.
I can download at about 830KB/sec.
But the Roku does not auto select high quality, I had to manually set it.

the prob with netflix isnt if they will be the big bad boy its the fact that can they do it right i have it and i am done with everything i wanted to see allready they dont have enough new items on the online watch it it now and that needs to change or i am someone who wont be keeping it its really right now not worth it

more of everything would be nice

Not worth it? The streaming video is free.

How long will the instant feature of netflix be free (to paid subscribers)? I have been very impressed with the service, but I do wonder if it's too good to be true. I was initially impressed with no extra charge for blu-rays but then came the $1/mo charge. No biggie, but what's to say we don't all get "hooked" on all of this and then BAM it's $2/movie? Just food for thought, I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

the SELECTION with both netflix streaming and amazon/tivo unbox downloads is horribly limited. i wanted to watch a "new" release the other day so i first went to amazon to download it to my tivo. the only option was to download and BUY it for 14.99. what the hell is that?? i had to drive to blockbuster to get the dvd. the entire drive over there i was afraid it was going to be rented and i out of luck.

this shouldn't happen. until netflix / amazon+tivo can get their act together and start offering the majority of movies through their service the situation for consumers is lacking.

I had to go Comcast internet and provided one in this area (Locality) knows something about IT, it's a pretty solid service. What I can't stand is Comcasts trumped up digital TV service charges, it's very hard for me to pay $80+ for 75 channels of worthless programing; I guess it's how tolerant people want to be with TV *Spam* pop-ups, endless interuptive ads and the relative two hands full of watchable channels.

Netflix was a breath of fresh air from the Blockbuster extortion and somehow I don't think BB will ever be able to realistically compete with Netflix. I don't feel sorry for the Comcast 'Pay-For-View' either at the same rate BB charges out. I would pay $1.99 ($2.00+TAX) for a movie, hardly think I'll pay $3+ for a Comcast streamed movie, when I can wait two days to get it for a $1.00; or less.

I had some issues with Netflix, cutting the stream and making it look like the ISP, seems they have their script down a lot better than they did. It DOES pay to understand that MS software will provide a better response. I run Netflix on a modified primary drive with the occasional issue, run it on a gaming HD that's optimised for all MS and don't have any problem. That's not some want to hear with consideration of the MS player.

Long story short, Netflix is the future for movies; people can keep their Trojans & spyware P2P streams and use bandwidth in a useless fashion (Just relating that to movies).

I wish I had money for stock in Netflix, they do everything right.

Cheers

They need to work some things out first.

First, the presentation of their Watch Instantly. There are several movies that ARE still available to stream, but aren't listed anywhere in the appropriate category.

Example:
Anime - Ghost in the Shell. Not anywhere in this category. Shameful. Same with Akira (though I think they just took that away?!)

There are others, but I'm not going to get into any more of that.

Searching works, but it's only good if you know exactly what you're after.

Second, the auto-bandwidth determination is sometimes inaccurate. Must be on a different bunch of servers, on a different set of lines, or maybe it just doesn't work as well as it could, I don't know.

What I DO know, is that there is a way to "force" a quality level. Finally got fed up with getting stuck on the lowest quality stream when I know my connection can handle their best.

They need to have a way to make this more obvious for the regular user. I'd rather wait for a quality experience to buffer for a little while.

Their max quality works fine on my friend's 3Mbps DSL connection.

A nice read is available here:
»blog.netflix.com/2008/11 ··· ing.html

Oh, and just because the option to choose your own bandwidth is "hidden" - here's how to do it.

-Start a movie, wait for it to actually start playing.
-click off to the side in the black area outside of the movie window
-Hold "Shift" key and press the letter "B" on your keyboard (Shift+B)
-Choose what level you'd like from the drop down list shown in the lower right corner
-Movie reloads at selected quality.
-Celebrate the triumph over silly hidden option and better quality video now showing

Why they don't allow a "geek mode" or "advanced user" mode that plainly shows these options, I don't know.

Furthermore,

The MPAA and whoever else needs to get over their fears of online video. Why shouldn't a stream be available for EVERY title that's available as a physical disc?

Why can iTunes/Rhapsody/etc. get so much music available, yet online movies are still stuck in perpetual oblivion?

People seem to still be bootlegging left and right - why don't they make a usable legal choice at least as competitive?

I'd pay for a streaming only service (no physical dvds delivered) if it were a good option.

Get over yourselves and make a legal online service that is actually worth the time/money and a bunch of people would likely give up even trying to bootleg things.

OH, and you'd make money. I'd bet you like money, right?

Maybe I just don't get it, but I'd think they'd WANT to push this, especially through an established service like Netflix.

Sure, one can buy iTunes movies, or from other sources, but RENTING movies (streaming?) is the way to go. Increase the selection, get over the lame fear(s), and start making this a little more awesome every day.

Why on earth artists/labels/studios DON'T want their material online, at LEGAL places, completely confuses me.

If it's due to hate for DRM, more power to 'em. Rhapsody now sells mp3s, as does Amazon, and a few others...
Perhaps the movie services could learn from that experience as well???
I can understand a "self destruct" for renting, but if a person BUYS a file, that file ought to work where the buyer would like it to work - on a PC, converted to DVD, to a portable, etc. shouldn't be a big deal.

I'm curious if there's any way to force a better quality level on the xbox. Sometimes it gives me the lowest quality available for no reason...They should at least give the user the option of having it buffer for 5..10..15 minutes and provide the highest quality HD they have.

I don't know... But it would be nice, I agree!

I've had mixed luck using the xbox - sometimes it's great, other times it goes to lowest quality.

Now that I've found the "secret" bandwidth trick, I wish the xbox had one!

I'm a long time customer & I LOVE there new streaming technology with the Tivo series 3. I watched three movies over the weekend & the quality & speed was AMAZING. I'm very impressed with what Tivo & Netflix are doing for home entertainment.

My wife bought me a Roku box for Christmas and I have been literally been watching tons of movies and series that I would be normally be waiting for in snail-mail form. The quality is great for our HD LCD display.

One of the few drawbacks I see is the lack of newly Released-to-DVD content available for Instant-Queue. For example, the entire series of Battlestar Galactica is not available for Instant-View, but the first two seasons of Weeds is.

Here's a highly annoying thing about Netflix's Instant-Queue for you Netflix subscribers using profiles, you can only select and view Instant-Queue movies and series through the main account only. If you're viewing titles under a profile, you can't even tell which titles are even available for Instant-Queue. Lame.

Overall and aside from a couple of drawbacks, I really look forward to Instant-Queue viewing. Beats waiting for the DVDs through snail-mail or driving to the store any day!

I agree with your assessment but I keep two things in mind...

(1) This is essentially version 1.0 but they hit it out of the park on the first swing. Now it's time to polish and refine the service.

(2) Netflix does not control what is made available, especially with new releases and television series. Those are dictated by the studios and by contracts with TV networks. The new-to-DVD issue has similar restrictions due to contracts with retailers and, ironically, the HBOs of the world.

At the end of the day, though, it is an impressive demonstration of what is possible with fairly primitive broadband resources.

I have regular netflix for blu-ray and I will simply dump them as a way to save money. Waiting for a disc to arrive is just slow and then waiting till everybody watches it. I wanted that on-demand but they don't have all movies on it and I refuse to run it on PC or buy dedicated box. Once PS3 support arrives, I will get it again. (a fun alternative to present torrent world)

I think when NetFlix went to the Xbox 360..it really gave Netflix a jump in the business of VOD=Video On Demand, PS3 on the other hand doesn't relay on NetFlix but Sony's own service, but if Sony ever does turn toward Netflix..I can imagine Netflix will own any other providers out there.

As far as caps..as long as their generous like Comcast (250gb/month) I don't see that as a problem, unless all you do is stream HD quality movies everyday, and use up more bandwidth on you're computer..

And as far as the way the economy is..I believe people are staying home for the most part and buying home entertainment, instead of going out and buying it. HDTV sales are on the rise and so is next-gen gaming consoles..

i signed up for the free trial for the online streaming and love it. just wish they would add some of the newer releases to the list.

after my first paid month im not sure ill continue just due to the choices avaliable for my streaming.

With caps and metering coming who cares who dominates, if you cant use it with getting charged a arm and a F%cking leg by your isp.

How long has Netflix been out? How long has the Instant Watch feature been out?

Watch instantly on PC Jan 16, 07.
Ruku service was May 20,08.
I got my Ruku box on June 6th, 08.

When the Telco/Cable companies (most people's Broadband provider) starts charging people massive overage charges like $1 a GB I think it will be a great big monkey wrench in the Netflix streaming video plan.

Having said that, I love Netflix.

This depends on whether or not monthly capping becomes the norm. If it does, I don't see this being very helpful to those with ridiculously low caps.

I know when we were heavy into the local family video scene we'd rent 7 maybe 8 videos a week @ 3.5gb per, we'd easily hit our cap after just a week of rentals. Even if we had the highest cap we'd still run out of data before the halfway point of the month.

Check my sig. to further your path to enlightenment.

I got a 42" Plasma for Christmas and combined with my 360, Netflix is King.

Sure, there's selection that could be better, but the process is rather awesome. I just need to get my cable provider to fix our area so I get more than 2mbps in the evenings