Daily Cup of Geek

It’s day 4 without cable, and honestly, without even turning my TV on once.

Before I dig into Netflix — which is really not a replacement for TV like everything else, but still an avenue I wanted to explore (afterall, they do have The Office and Sleeper Cell available for streaming, though they’re on DVD now) — a quick follow-up on Amazon Unbox.

I heard back from customer service a day or two after I emailed them.

I apologize for the trouble you have had using Amazon Unbox. The issue you are encountering is not associated with the normal operation of Amazon Unbox but suggests an issue with your installation of Windows Media Player.

Honestly? I can’t be bothered to try to troubleshoot it at this point (I’ve never had issues with my installation of WMP before), and I’m just glad I downloaded free content, and didn’t shell out $5 for an episode of something that won’t work.

The final verdict on Unbox? Box it up, send it back, and on to the next one…

Within the last week or two Netflix lifted the limits on their “instant” movie viewing. This came immediately before Apple’s announcement about iTunes movie rentals. The Netflix and Apple video services both have their pros and cons, but more interestingly, actually target different audiences.

That said… my experience with Netflix was instantly 100x better than Unbox. It requires Windows Media Player (again, Mac users are left in the cold) and you do have to install the “Netflix player” which runs in Internet Explorer, but because the service is streaming, I didn’t have to give up a couple of gigs of valuable hard drive space to watch something. Additionally, the service appears to adjust the quality of the video according to the speed of your connection. I have a blazingly fast connection at home, so the quality of my videos went up. =)

Hooked up to my widescreen HD monitor at home, it isn’t DVD quality, but it is surprisingly good with zero buffering. The fact that my experience is pretty much flawless, even with running it in Windows via Parallels is huge.

And I will confess, I actually have a movie running on my HD monitor in fullscreen while I am typing this on the same computer. There is the occasional stutter from running as many apps as I am, but for the most part there has been no impact on my movie. Brilliant!

Of course, the downside to Netflix streaming service is the aforementioned Windows only compatibility, as well as the limited number of movies / TV shows they have available and the fact that most of them are pretty old (they have A Boy and His Dog!). Overall, though, a thumbs up.

I am not limited to YouTube tonight! =)

This entry was posted by Bronwyn Lewis, on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 12:02 am and is filed under cable tv-free, drm, microsoft, streaming, television. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.