The Future Of Home Entertainment

My stereo receiver is more than 15 years old. My TV does not have an HDMA input. I have no surround sound speakers. Despite these technological-fitment shortcomings, I declare myself an early adopter in the home theater arena, for I have begun … streaming movies.

Netflix is beginning to live up to its name. We dumped the movie service less than a year ago when we finally decided that we could not justify the $18 per month it cost us to store three of their DVDs unwatched on our shelves. Two weeks ago, though, Netflix rolled out its new streaming movie service for the PlayStation 3 platform. Within a day of availability of the new service, we returned to the Netflix world. Now paying only $9 per month, we only get one DVD at a time, but unlimited streaming video.

It’s awesome.

The title availability is limited for now. However, there are still plenty of movies to see, and it is inevitable that selection will increase over time until the entire catalog is available for download.

Practically speaking, the streaming process is very easy and effective. The PS3 must run a special Netflix disk, but once in, it does not require anything in particular of the user. It simply drops the viewer into a dedicated Netflix “library.” The interface is not as easy to use as the website; you are resigned to scroll sequentially (alphabetically) through all of the available movies for each category. There is as of yet no search feature. I imagine greater capabilities will come to the movie selection interface in the future. Other than that slight annoyance, the rest of the experience is seamless. The movie boots up within a few seconds, and the picture quality is acceptable (not HD, but certainly on a par with conventional DVDs).

So far, I have made the most use of the Documentary category. It is like having a really good on-demand library of the most interesting PBS and Discovery features available whenever you want to see them.

In short, on-demand movie viewing through streaming video through the internet is, without question, the future of home entertainment. The convenience is unparalleled. There are two potential drawbacks: lack of high definition products, which will likely be rectified in the future; and the threat of internet usage limits by service providers. I have no idea what kind of load streaming a movie from Netflix puts on our DSL service, but if AT&T wants to follow some of its fellow internet providers, I may receive a notice someday that I will have to pay a premium for data transfer over a designated limit. Such surcharges have been used to rein in heavy-duty gamers; I don’t know if mere movie watching places similar demands on the internet service infrastructure. I hope not. Eventually, this is the way home entertainment will be done. The information plumbers will just have to get used to installing bigger pipes.