Okay, so maybe it’s not free as it requires you to be a paying Netflix subscriber but it’s at least a new (not so much anymore I guess but, as always, it takes me a while to catch on) benefit to subscribers for the same fees. What I’m talking about is Netflix’s “Watch Now” feature that allows you to pretty much instantly stream movies on to your computer off their site. You can read more about how it works on their site but the main tidbit is that you can stream an hour of video for every dollar you already pay for Netflix monthly.

I remember a while back (possibly a really long while actually) when Netflix first started offering video and for some reason I didn’t really pay attention. I think it’s again related to the fact that I’ve never really been one to watch movies on my PC as well as the assumption that it would have probably been a pay service. I just tried it out though and it’s pretty impressive. It really is near instant (e.g., took about 5 seconds for the movie to start streaming–and streaming really smoothly at that) and the quality is good enough to watch at full-screen.

Anyway, what led me to check the service out was one of the demos they have up from Mix ’07 (mix07.com) where they demo this service using a Silverlight version of the player. Very slick and I hope they update the player soon (at least I’m pretty sure the one I just experienced wasn’t the same they demo’d–still pretty good though). The more I see of Silverlight, the more I’m realizing I should have been paying more attention. Fun times ahead…