Rich Fiscus
4 Sep 2007 17:46
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