In a somewhat ironic situation, Microsoft has done what Apple could not – Bring Netflix streaming to the Mac.
Netflix has had unlimited streaming since January, even for the 1 DVD a month plan.
Now, you can opt in into a beta for NetFlix.
The quality seems ok. The movie I sampled this morning, Grindhouse, was from a Starz cable tv print it seemed. Didn’t matter, that movie was meant to look bad 🙂
I noticed some tearing in scenes with horizontal pans. It is a bummer that even today on a brand new Mac Book Pro, we still have tearing issues.
The quality was perfectly acceptable however. The video frame was large. When silverlight detects that bandwidth is reduced, it will pause the movie and downgrade the video quality. I do not know if it automatically upgrades quality if the bandwidth improves.
A forced Time Machine backup during playback didn’t affect the movie whatsoever.
Apple should consider opening up QuickTime more, because now with Silverlight making a strong charge, Apple finally has a decent competitor in the field.
Hopefully ISP’s won’t go the bandwidth cap route, if so, it’ll kill all these kinds of services.