Sunday, March 28, 2010

Netflix streaming on the Wii = WIN

I got my Netflix streaming disk for the Wii in the mail the other day. When I first heard about it, I was interested, but not hopeful. Streaming video to a computer monitor is one thing. But blowing that up enough for a 30" TV while still having decent resolution is more difficult. And with the challenges from movie companies to limit online content, the selection is bound to be limited.

But I went ahead and plopped it in and checked it out.

So far, I'm very impressed. I've watched a few movies and the quality has been superb. The Guild was nice and shiny. Angles & Demons was perfectly clear. Ghost in the Shell, a bit fuzzy, but then again, it's an older anime series and they tend to look that way anyway. So we'll go with it faithfully reproducing the quality of the source material.

In what I've watched so far, there hasn't been even a second of lag once the movie has buffered. Speedy servers on Netflix's end.

As far as the selection, 14/94 items on my original queue have online streaming available. Some of it is anime, which only streams as the dubbed version, so I'll probably get the disks on that.

However, I flipped through the items available from the menu and found several more things I probably wouldn't have added to my DVD queue, but would definitely stream episodes of here and there. For example: The first four seasons of Mythbusters! Epic. Dr. Who? Got it. Carl Sagan's Cosmos? Yeah, it's there.

Overall, the streaming to Wii (and other systems) is awesome. Limited, but hopefully it will continue to grow.

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