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A little while back, I wrote about Netflix “Watch Now”, the movie streaming service from Netflix. Today, I was finally able to test it out, as my account had it activated (how, I’m not quite sure—the tab just appeared). Overall, I was fairly impressed: my thoughts on the good and bad follow:

The Good

• Generous viewing time – For every $1 you spend on Netflix each month, you get 1 hour of online viewing. This means that I get 15 hours per month that I can watch movies online—not bad! There’s even a potential for bonus time.
• Good video quality – For streaming video, the quality was quite good. I had no problems with skipping, although the soundtrack was a little off during portions of the movie (Word Wars is what I watched)
• Quick and easy installation – To get the player running, it took at most five minutes—I fired up Internet Explorer (which unfortunately is the only supported browser at the moment) and Netflix installed everything for me. The only little blip was that Windows Media Player had to be upgraded, but that was as simple as pressing “Upgrade”.
• Easy to use player – The video player was dead easy to operate—play, pause, fast forward—all of the basic controls you need.

The Bad

• Limited selection – At the moment, only 13 of the 156 movies in my queue were available to be viewed online and, with the exception of Word Wars, they were all fairly old. I’m sure this will improve with time, but at the moment, it’s a little disappointing.
• No advanced features – I was unable to find any way to display subtitles, and there certainly weren’t any special features—just the movie.
• No auto-resume – Unless I’m mistaken, there is no way to resume a movie where you left off. For instance, I watched a few minutes of the movie and then exited. It would have been nice if it restarted right where I left off, but instead, it went back to beginning. Annoying, but not terrible.
• Only supported on Windows in Internet Explorer – This is a real downer, but hopefully they’re working on other systems/browsers. I really don’t like opening up IE any more than I have to.

The Ugly

• Watch Now crashed my browser twice, and I had to reboot my system. – When I started the movie, I exited out once or twice, to see what would happen. The second time, I had to force quit IE, and open it back up again. The movie still wouldn’t play, so I had to do a reboot. After that, everything went fine, but it didn’t leave the best first impression.

I’m really interested to see how this service plays out—it could either be a huge flop or a big success. I think that, as long as newer movies are released this way, it will take off. Otherwise, I don’t see it gaining widespread use.