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Netflix streaming service gaining popularity

4 September 2007 17:46 by Rich "vurbal" Fiscus | 5 comments

Netflix announced that the number of viewings of movies from the company's Watch Now service have greatly increased since it was rolled out to customers around the beginnining of the year.

Watch Now is a streaming service intended to compte with rival rental company Blockbuster. Last year Blockbuster introduced online rental plans that enabled customers to return movies directly to their brick and mortar stores across the US. This has proved to be the most competition Netflix has had since their inception 10 years ago.

Netflix customers automatically receive one hour per month of Watch Now streaming for every dollar they pay for their rental plans. Additional hours can be purchased for a fee. Movies can't be saved to the customer's hard drive for later viewing, and while they claim to offer video up to DVD quality, in order to take advantage of that quality requires a lot of sustained bandwidth (at least 3Mbps according to the Netflix website).

Despite the increase in streaming, it's still a very small portion of the company's business.

"We ship 1.6 million DVDs a day, five days a week. [Streaming usage is] still a small percentage as most people want their content on DVD�not just from Netflix but across the board," said Steve Swasey, company spokesman.

In 2008 Netflix also has plans to introduce a settop box intended for streaming movies.

Source: Video Business

Permalink to this article

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Discuss this article!
WierdName (Senior Member) 4 September 2007 18:03
Movies can't be saved to the customer's hard drive for later viewing... Really? For some reason that doesn't sound right... cough [ + quote]
albino92 (Member) 4 September 2007 19:12
The movies suck anyways. [ + quote]
lamain (Newbie) 5 September 2007 9:46
I really like this service if they would just get a larger selection. I get most of my movies in DVD format because they offer almost nothing on watch now. we used it for around a week before we ran out of movies we where interested in. If they offered the same selection on watch now as they do in DVD format I would drop the DVDs and switch entirely to watch now. If they offered a serves like that. [ + quote]
albino92 (Member) 5 September 2007 10:24
*Originally posted by lamain:* I really like this service if they would just get a larger selection. I get most of my movies in DVD format because they offer almost nothing on watch now. we used it for around a week before we ran out of movies we where interested in. If they offered the same selection on watch now as they do in DVD format I would drop the DVDs and switch entirely to watch now. If they offered a serves like that. Yes i agree 100% [ + quote]
borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 10 September 2007 15:49
Is it increasing popularity with its exsisting customer base or is it new customers. ?? [ + quote]