As a long time Netflix subscriber, I was pretty excited when I heard they were taking strides to make their library available digitally. Then I thought about it for a few more minutes and realized that I didn't want to sit in my computer chair for hours to watch a movie. Without a comfortable location with room for multiple people to view the movies, online streaming of movies is kind of useless.

When it was announced at E3 that Microsoft and Netflix were teaming up to bring streaming movies to Xbox Live, I changed my entire outlook on the service. Now I was able to stream movies while sitting on a couch. Joy. I was especially excited with the ability to watch movies with Live friends (so they can mooch off of my Netflix account).

A week or two ago, I was staying with my cousin in Chicago, and he had his computer running directly to his HD TV, and I realized it was the perfect chance to give Netflix online rentals a run through.

The first thing I wanted to see was the depth of their current online library. I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with the selection. There are a fair amount of A-list titles, but the service seems flooded with tons of B movies. There was a really nice selection of documentary titles, however, which is a nice. Also, there are plenty of kids films, and some of them very nostalgic (Secret of Nim, dude...sold).

There are a lot of television series represented as well. ABC, CBS, Showtime, FOX ,and other major networks are all well represented. If you're anything like me, you prefer to watch television on your own schedule (which means an entire season of Heroes in one sitting).

I expect that the library will grow considerably over the coming months. There's probably a lot of red tape that comes along with putting a studio’s entire DVD catalogue on the internet.

As for video quality, I have to say it looked nice. I'm sure streaming will work differently on the Xbox than through a web browser, but I'd imagine they are working with relatively similar technology. There appears to be three levels of quality that are determined by the speed of your connection. We got a high quality signal, but initially we had some issues and were only getting low quality. In low, the movie was nearly unwatchable. It was like blowing up a youtube video to a fullscreen display, it scaled horribly. High quality was much better, and I can say it is comparable to watch a high quality DVD rip. Not perfect, but it's damn near there.

If the Live Netflix service is similar to their current offering, then I think we are in for a treat. Now if they could just add a feature to download movies to your 360's HDD so there is no worry of dropped connections or slow down from downloading. We'll see, but as of right now I'm ready to bust out the virtual popcorn as soon as the Fall update hits.

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