every day i write the book

Netflix Watch Now

Posted by psd on February 1, 2007  |  No Comments

Yesterday after I got bumped to a Watch Now customer, I was going to watch The Puffy Chair, but it just wasn’t convenient at the time. So I came back today to watch. I forgot about the IE tab, and found that Firefox alone was not a compatible browser for Watch Now viewing. Queue the IE tab and press play.

The movie streamed with nary a glitch; the audio was a little low, but easily tweaked. In general, I have to say I was very pleased with the service and will be watching more movies this way in the future. I wish it was Mac compatible. I wish it were Firefox compatible. But, it is what it is: a service enhancement.

The list of movies available to watch now is extremely limited. A lot of older, obscure stuff and television series. I can’t say I found a dozen new(er) releases on the list. They’ll definitely have to add more better offerings to please the masses.

Ease of Use: A
Quality of Video: A
Depth of choices: C

I won the Netflix lottery!

Posted by psd on January 31, 2007  |  No Comments

About a week ago, I was following a story on Netflix’ new Watch Now service where you can stream movies from their website for free as part of your subscription. Problem was, the service was not going to be available until June.

Well, the very informative Hacking Netflix site gave some tips on an unofficial ‘lottery’ of sorts where random account holders might log in to find a Watch Now tab miraculously appear, allowing one to be an early adopter of the service. Well, wouldn’t you know, I logged in tonight and there she was! The Watch Now tab!

The trick is as follows:

1. Log in to your Netflix account.
2. Click on the “Your Account” link at the top of the page.
3. About halfway down on the right, click a link that says “Learn how to watch movies live on your PC”.
4. If you win the ‘lottery’, a Watch Now tab will appear in your set of navigation tabs. If you don’t, you’ll see the Watch Now preview page telling you to wait until June.
I tried this about a half dozen different days before it worked. It’s also been said that IE takes preference over Firefox, so to increase my odds of being picked, I used both IE 7 and the Firefox IE tab. I hit the jackpot using the Firefox IE tab.

I had to install a smallish app (the Netflix Movie Viewer), which took only a few minutes on broadband, and my chosen movie began to play. I’ll update on the quality and ease of use once I actually watch it–I picked The Puffy Chair because it was in my queue anyway.