Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

First NetFlix streamed movie

Well, I’m sure doing what we did tonight will seem like old hat in 10 years, but it was really amazing at this point: We watched our first Internet-streamed movie from NetFlix! Glen Bull blogged about this a couple of weeks ago, and thanks to him bringing this capability to my attention we enjoyed “the Duke” in his 1972 film “The Cowboys” tonight! We didn’t have to go to a video rental store and we didn’t have to wait 2-3 days for a DVD to arrive in the mail. VERY cool! (I think I was much more impressed by this than anyone else in my family, however. To the kids, I think it seemed like “just another movie.”)

Overall the experience was good. Several observations:

  1. The NetFlix streaming video service is Windows XP SP2 Internet Explorer only, so I had to run Parallels on my MacBook to do this.
  2. Video quality was generally good overall, but a few times the video frame rate seemed a bit choppy or fast. Probably we were dropping a few packets at that point. That only seemed to happen once or twice however, and didn’t detract noticeably from our ability to enjoy the movie.
  3. I had to disable my free ZoneAlarm firewall software in Windows XP for the video streaming to work after the viewer application from NetFlix installed. I tried to just allow the NetFlix application in ZoneAlarm, but couldn’t find an executable file in the Program Files directory to approve.
  4. We used a Macbook Mini-DVI to Video adapter to play the video on our non-HD television through the VCR AUX2 input on the front, and a Radio Shack 1/8″ stereo to RCA “Y” adapter to send the audio to our stereo system.
  5. Perhaps the biggest question for most consumers wanting do this sort of thing is needing a computer in the living room that connects to the TV. Most people don’t have a computer in their living room currently and may not want to put one there. Having a laptop that could sit on top of the stereo while the movie played (streaming wirelessly over our home 802.11B connection, I might add) solved this problem for us. Folks without a laptop are in more of a bind to do this right now on their main television. Not everyone has a cable to convert the computer signal to S-video or composite video either, and that is needed if you want the video to play on the TV.

Hopefully NetFlix will release a native Macintosh OS X player application in the near future. It was very cool to be able to watch a video on demand like this, however, especially WITHOUT paying anything extra beyond the monthly subscription fee we already pay to NetFlix. 🙂

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One response to “First NetFlix streamed movie”

  1. Tonya Witherspoon Avatar
    Tonya Witherspoon

    Hey Wes, This sounds really cool-thanks for sharing. We’ve been planning to do that at our house too. We currently use NetFlix and think that the streaming option is going to work even better. In our basement we don’t have a TV but instead have our cable, PS3, and our server connected to a projector. This set-up was actually less than purchasing a nice television and a cabinet or console to put the TV on. It works well when we’re playing our Wii too – we don’t have to worry about throwing the controller at a screen and breaking it. All that would happen is a ding on our wall =)

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