Netflix $100 box: free movie streams for subscribers

Movie rentals… What a hassle, first get out of your comfortable home, go to the video store then hope they have the movie you want, pay and then when you’re done you have to return it. At least the DVD made sure you don’t have to rewind the tape anymore. Fortunately in more and more countries video rentals by post are becoming common. By picking movies from a list on a website you get your movies conveniently at home. Still you need to return them, can’t watch your favorite movie at the moment you would like to and you still have to hope the DVD is physically available when they need to ship it to you.

Video On Demand is the keyword here, this should solve all the problems above. By making online movies available as an internet stream the physical part is gone, shipping time is gone and you can just watch the movies whenever you like without having to leave your house. But it requires a fast internet connection and there have to be companies offering it, at a reasonable price.

Till now VoD (Video on Demand) never really took off, but Netflix is currently offering a $99 box that allows its customers to play ten thousands of movies on the TV instantly, with no extra charge besides their normal monthly fee.

The box is developed by Roku, a Californian start-up which you might know for its streaming internet music players (e.g. the Soundbrigde sold by the Pinnacle brand).

According to the people who have tried the device it is very easy to use and has excellent picture and sound quality, certainly compared to other competitors and all for the reasonable price of $100. Still Netflix only offers 10,000 movies trough the box, which is only a small part of the about 100,000 titles the company has in its inventory and most of the 10,000 are five year old (or older) which is thanks to the way Hollywood studios sell their rights to its products.

Netflix customers who have plans that cost at least $8.99 a month will have access to an unlimited number of movies over the Internet. A fast internet connection is required, the device has no hard disk so it needs to stream it directly from the net, the company recommends at least 1.5 Mbit.

Anyone going for this? Us Europeans will probably have to wait years before we get decent VoD…