Netflix's 'Watch Now' on the Xbox: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I signed up this weekend for Netflix's (NFLX) "Watch Now" service on my XBox 360 and have to say that after a weekend of intensively playing around with the new service, my impressions are largely positive.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this new service, basically Netflix and Microsoft (MSFT) have partnered to allow you to access over 10,000 videos on demand from Netflix (including many in high def). This new service was first announced by Microsoft earlier this year at E3.

The Good

1. Did I mention that you can now directly stream over 10,000 different titles (many in high def) directly to your XBox 360?

The number and quality of titles is impressive. I was suprised at how many great movies and TV shows are now included as Netflix "Watch Now" offerings. I'm not sure if Netflix has expanded the number of titles available over earlier versions of Watch Now, but I had no problem finding plenty of interesting content that I wanted to watch this weekend and I've got dozens of more movies lined up still to consume. This weekend I watched a great indie movie called "Winter Passing" on the service. I also watched an episode of "CSI" as well as an old episode of "The Twilight Zone." I browsed several different movies and watched portions of them, including "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" and "The Hoax."

2. In terms of image quality, I thought it was superb. There was no stuttering or compression loss, or any other deterioration that I noticed. It felt exactly like you were watching a DVD from Netflix. It only took about 20 seconds or so for the service to fire up a movie. High Def looks like high def (they let you know when you are watching something in HD at the beginning of the show).

3. It's cheap. There is no additional cost from Netflix for Watch Now. Anyone with a 1 disc a month or more Netflix plan qualifies to receive the service free of charge (see my comments under Live Gold required below). A 1 disc a month plan from Netflix costs $8.99 per month. Through Netflix's watch now service, combined with new releases that I can get from them via DVD, I have more than enough content to view, watch, and consume. With this service there is *no* reason for me to subscribe to cable or satellite service anymore. $14 a month is far cheaper than the $100 a month or so that cable/satellite providers charge. I canceled my DirecTV (DTV) service a number of months back and definitely do not miss the $120 a month I was paying them directly for my media content.

4. It was easy to set up. I simply entered in my netflix email address and password and in less than 60 seconds a file downloaded, installed itself, and I was ready to go.

Based on the four points above, I largely consider the new service a success. The four points above account for 90% of my positive feelings about the service. There are some small things that I didn't like, but these are small in comparison to the overall satisfactory experience that I had with the service.

The Bad

1. Microsoft requires you to have a "Live Gold" Membership in order to access this service. This seems kind of chump to me. I don't have to pay for a "Live Gold" Membership in order to watch "Watch Now" on my PC or on my Mac or on the vmcNetflix Watch Now Media Center Plug In (that unfortunately I can't get to work on my XBox 360 as an extender), so why should I have to pay a $50 a year toll to Microsoft to watch it on my XBox 360? I have no use or desire for any of the features of XBox Gold Live and it felt distasteful to me that I had to sign up for this service in order to use it.

2. Not all Watch Now titles can be watched on the XBox 360. Although most of the titles that I had in my instant viewing queue on Netflix were available, some (like a Charles Bukowski documentary that I wanted to watch and which is badly synced on the Mac version of watch now) are not able to be streamed to the XBox 360.

3. Fast forwarding, skipping and rewinding felt awkward on the service. When I watched a CSI episode I didn't want to watch the opening song and credits to the show. When I pushed the skip forward button on my remote I thought that it should have jumped directly to the start of the show, rather than to the 5 minutes-into-the-show viewpoint. Fast forwarding and rewinding are equally awkward, giving you freeze frames of the show to various points vs. a streaming sort of experience like I'm used to on Media Center and TiVo (TIVO).

4. The service is not available outside of the U.S. This doesn't affect me of course, but it will affect people outside the U.S.

The Ugly

The only thing that I really, really hated about the service was how poorly it handled multiple XBox units in the same household. I realize that I'm likely on the bleeding edge here as most households probably don't have more than one XBox, but in my case I'm using them as Media Center extender units and have one in my kitchen, one in my living room and one in my bedroom.

At first I was pleased to find that I could watch Netflix movies on any of the three XBox units with the same XBox Live Gold Membership. This was good. But then I found out that when you log on to the service on one XBox 360, it kicks you off on the other XBox 360. The only way to get your service back is to reclaim your "gamer tag" on the unit that you want to use it on. Fundamentally (although this is annoying), I can sort of understand this. But functionally speaking, recovering your "gamer tag" with an XBox 360 remote is a royal pain in the ass.

First off, it is not clear that your XBox 360 not playing has anything to do with the fact that you are logged on to another XBox 360 in your home. When you try to log in, it simply tells you that your membership is invalid. After hunting around a while I figured out how to "reclaim" my gamertag. But here is where it becomes a royal pain in the ass. In order to "reclaim" your gamertag, you first have to enter in your gamertag ID, then your email address, and then your password. Normally this wouldn't be such a problem, but when trying to enter all of this data with an XBox 360 controller, which involves poking around with a joystick on a screen of letters one by one, this is so annoying.

I'm not sure why my XBox 360 can't simply be smart enough to understand that all of my XBox 360 units are on the same network and allow me to use the service on any of them in my household, or alternatively at least allow me a simply one touch button to alternate between XBox 360s. The cumbersome task of having to enter in all of those letters one by one was a big disappointment.

Of course if Microsoft didn't require the XBox Live Gold Membership, this probably wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

Comments

[ajbstrat:]

Good review....thanks for the honest info. I'm all for circumventing my expensive cable TV service, but not at the expense of an immature new service. That multiple-XBox issue is the biggest negative for me as well, since i have two boys who would most likely want to be on the service when i am too. I'll wait for "Watch It Now" to truly enter the world of "Prime-Time-TV". rgds.

2008 Dec 09 08:36 AM

[Jonathan Scott:]

It all appears to be good. When the competition heats up it will get even better. I look forward to improving on an already good product.
I would like someone to offer the ability to search transcripts of shows so I can find, for example, any 60-minutes episode that mentions "Enron" or "Exxon" or "Chrysler", etc.

2008 Dec 09 12:44 PM

[Gwen OverYo...:]

I have the Netflix Roku box ($99) which allows me to stream/watch Instant Play movies on my TV in the same way Xbox is doing it. However, with the Netflix account of 1 movie or more you have access to watching the Instant Play directly on your computer or laptop at no additional cost. My total monthly bill for 2 movies is $14.24. I am truly happy about that. Beats paying the cable people all that money for channels I dont ever watch.

2008 Dec 10 01:17 PM

[briendownie:]

Wow, so you've got the X360's *just* for media center extenders? hardcore.

So I take it you're not a gamer at all then? 'cause I would think that most of us gamers would be paying for the gold membership and wouldn't even care.

then again, to really scale this thing, MS is probably looking to go beyond the "core" gamer audience anyway, so yeah, they should probably do away with the gold membership requirement.

2008 Dec 30 04:12 PM

[jargonfacer:]

Hey, don't know if you got this resolved on your own, but I wanted to let you know of something I did that should resolve your issue. I encountered a similar problem when I was playing Rock Band on two different Xbox 360s. I had to do an account recovery each time, which is precisely as annoying as you mention.

BUT, if you buy a memory unit (you can get a 64MB or 256MB one for under $20 on Amazon) and move your profile onto the unit, you can just move the memory unit from Xbox to Xbox. It'll save you time and, more importantly, sanity.

May 06 10:06 AM