I used to do a segment on the Cinecast entitled “on the road with Andrew’s iPod” in which I reviewed a different, usually shitty, movie each week that I had watched on my iPod while driving or bussing it to work. That segment was usually met with either a lot of head shaking or laughs or both. Since I’ve quit my job where I got the free digital copies, that segment has pretty much disappeared. But the good news is that segment might be coming back!
If the rumors are true, I’ll be able to pick up an iPhone this January with my Verizon account and with that comes the new feature of streaming movies from Netflix on their instant watch function and the brand new Netflix app released by Apple. The new app was announced in June and went live today! There’s a quick video at the previous link showing a little bit of how it looks, but if you haven’t seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo yet, maybe it best to avoid!
The new iTunes available app costs zero and will work for anyone with an iPod touch or an iPhone and a Netflix account with at least the $8.99 package or higher. I’m pretty stoked about this news. Not everyone is as excited about it as I am though…
I downloaded it this morning as soon as I heard and tried it out – it works surprisingly well even on 3G. I’d heard rumors that trying to watch video any longer than your average 3-minute YouTube clip got pretty tedious on iPhone/iPad unless you were on WiFi, but it buffered pretty quickly, was good quality, and didn’t stutter or anything. It paused a time or two to briefly rebuffer, but not often, and it picked right back up with no issues. Maybe not quite your perfect movie-watching experience, but for those times when you’re stuck waiting or on public transit or whatever, it’s certainly more than adequate, and honestly, better than I was expecting.
Oh, and I should mention I’m using an iPhone 3G, so two generations back from the current iPhones. The pausing I experienced could even be due to memory allocation on my phone rather than 3G speeds. It will probably work even better on the iPhone 4.
Can you get this for the iPad? That’d be pretty sweet.
I don’t know why I’m asking though:
a) I don’t live in the US so can’t get Netflix
b) I don’t have an iPad or even an iPhone for that matter
I guess I’m just intrigued
I like the sound of the segment though. It’s always interesting to watch random films cold that you wouldn’t normally buy or rent.
when will people learn that bit torrent is better than any of this?
David, it’s been available for the iPad since the iPad launched. They’ve just made it available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
fivi, we are aware of the assets of bit torrent, but some of us still prefer to get movies and TV legally when possible. As more and more things like Netflix streaming become available, more convenient and more comprehensive, I’m certainly happy to switch over and use them. Also, if you live in the US and have a Netflix subscription anyway, I’d argue that Instant Watch is a better user experience than bit torrent for many, many reasons.
Agreed Jandy. Bittorrent doesn’t play on my PS3 – hence doesn’t play on my big TV. Not a huge fan of watching things on my computer if I don’t have to. And yeah, if the movie exists on Netflix, I would watch it there since it’s A) legal and B) MUCH faster.
So no, bit torrent is not better than any of this. And can you bit torrent on your phone while on a bus ride or something? No.
Not to mention bit torrent can be unreliable and take forever. That statement pisses me off the more I think about it.
Well, can you play torrented files on your PS3 if you convert them to a PS3-friendly format? I can play torrented files on my Xbox360. And technically there are phone torrent clients, but I’ve never gotten them to work on my jailbroken iPhone – certainly not something that’s user-friendly to anyone who’s not a super-savvy geek. There are ways around most things, but yeah – illegal, often hours to download, sometimes sketchy files, having to wade through multiple trackers and files to find what you want – all that is beat by Netflix. One click, a few seconds of buffering, done.
And in amazingly good quality. I was shocked at how good Mary and Max looked the other night – damn near blu-ray quality.
And yeah, I suppose if I converted the file into something PS3 friendly, moved my hard drive over to the other side of the room and plugged it into my PS3 and transferred the files over I could possibly play a torrented file on my system. Pain. in. the. ass. And not even sure how to make that work.
Plus there’s always a chance what you download from bit torrent could be riddled with viruses, trojans etc. I used to get a lot of music through that but with Spotify and the like what’s the point.
We’ve got LoveFilm in the UK which is very similar to Netflix. The instant watch films on there don’t look great on my laptop though. Hopefully it’ll improve as it gets more popular.
Not to mention bit torrent can be unreliable and take forever. That statement pisses me off the more I think about it.
Use better torrent sites.
Also, any avi file you can play on your TV. It costs maybe $20 and 30 seconds of work to pull off and you’re watching high quality downloaded content. Hell, you can watch ripped Blu-rays if you really want to go all out.
Plus there’s always a chance what you download from bit torrent could be riddled with viruses, trojans etc.
Once again, use better torrent sites.
And just read comments and if you’re really a pussy scan the file before you play it. I’ve been using torrents for damn near a decade and I’ve never gotten a virus.
But then I’m not an idiot.
Of course you CAN use torrents safely and do what you want with them, but it’s hardly as convenient as Netflix. It all depends on what is “better” for you. If I want to watch a movie on my iPhone (which is what this post is about) I can torrent it, which takes under best of circumstances let’s say 30 minutes, then convert it to iTunes format which takes a couple of hours, then transfer it to my iPhone, which takes five minutes, that’s assuming I have room on my iPhone to store a movie (which by the way I don’t). So we’re up to 2 hours 35 minutes of prep time for something that needs 700mb of free space on my iPhone. I had to go to a torrent site, find the file, read the comments to make sure it’s a quality file, download the file, convert it, transfer it. I had to use at minimum two programs, likely three or four. With Netflix Instant Watch on my iPhone, I can open an application, browse or search for what I want, click play, and it plays within ten seconds. Don’t need to convert it, don’t need to use my computer, don’t need to read anything to make sure it’s safe, don’t need to free up space on my phone.
Granted, it doesn’t work in all use cases, but for the use case of “I want to watch a movie right now,” it has torrents beat hands down. Plus, it’s legal, and though I’m far from a stickler for by-the-book legality, I prefer to do things legally if there’s a compelling legal method, and I find this compelling.
If I want to watch a movie on my iPhone (which is what this post is about) I can torrent it, which takes under best of circumstances let’s say 30 minutes
Once again, use better torrent sites. I can download high quality avi formats on some sites in less than 10 minutes and often close to 5. And on those sites you don’t need to double check anything.
And within 10 seconds? I doubt that, especially with how crappy the AT&T network is. The Netflix app is bound to absolutely cripple it and only further the divide between Apple and AT&T.
And as someone who is a die hard fan of Netflix Instant Streaming, it still can’t beat torrents and probably won’t for sometime, simply due to the limitations on what is available and for the length of times they are.
Are you honestly saying that .torrent is better than a legal streaming service or are you just being difficult?
And yes, if the movie has 2000 seeders, you might be able to download it in ten minutes. But if I’m downloading something, more than likely it’s something fairly obscure (like Kafka or Saragossa Manuscript). This is not accomplished in 10 minutes.
I’m not saying I don’t torrent, I do. And usually safely. But Netflix is light years easier. It just is. Period.
The UK is pretty far behind most of the Western world in Broadband speeds so it’s still a long slog to download torrented files over here unless I’m just using the wrong sites as you suggest Matt. I guess I’m too much of a collector too so I’m still struggling to get into having everything stored digitally. I’ll be clogging up my house with unwatched DVD’s and Blu Rays for years to come I imagine. It’s an addiction…
Nope, if you are a good site you can download movies with just a handful of seeders in mere minutes. I routinely download torrents at well over 1 MB/sec.
Right now I’m uploading at 250KB/sec for a lesser known film. It only takes a couple people doing that and you have lightning fast downloads. I could probably download even quicker but Comcast limits the amount of bandwidth you can use at any one time.
And I’m not arguing that Netflix isn’t easy to use, but it still has huge restrictions when it comes to streaming. Only select titles are available, and often times for limited time frames. On top of that their stuff through XBox and PS3 is designed to limit your choices for anything outside of your queue. Meaning I have to add movies on my computer to my instant streaming queue then go walk into the other room and watch in there. That’s a hassle, and no different from me walking into the other room with an avi on a flash drive to run through my TV.
And when it comes down to it Netflix simply can’t compete with the range of selection available with torrents. I can find pretty much any movie ever made, and Netflix simply can’t compete with that and probably never will be able to. And I value selection more than I do convenience. That torrents are roughly comparable in convenience with far more selection it makes it any easy choice for me on which I rely upon more. Especially with some of the crazier titles that I watch.
So, for you, torrents are a better solution. That’s fine. All I’m saying in response to the post that said “when will people learn that torrents are better” is that they aren’t always better. If something’s available on Netflix, I’m sure as hell not going to bother looking for it on a torrent site. It’s a hierarchy. Torrenting is my last option after I can’t find something any legal way. I’m much happier supporting legal streaming methods and encouraging content providers to work with them to increase the selection and convenience rather than defaulting to torrents when there are legal options. But use-cases differ.
And my computer is in the same room as my TV, and my phone is always with me, and I can add things to my queue either way. They’re introducing full search capability on third-party devices (Roku already has it, I think Wii may as well), so I’d be surprised if the Xbox and PS3 don’t lose the queue-lock-in restriction soon.
Hm. Not sure about Xbox, but I can browse the entire catalog of movies on my PS3. Maybe that’s a new feature, I don’t know. It breaks it all down into genres and really weird sub-genres (e.g. “visually appealing films” or “excessively gory”). Pretty good stuff.
And yeah, I torrent stuff all the time and it’s usually pretty good. Just saying, like Jandy, if a movie is available on Netflix streaming, I’ll take that 10 times out of 10 over a .torrent file. Just like I’ll take watching the actual DVD 10 times out of 10 over the Netflix streaming.
They break it into catagories but its not the entire catalog that they have available to browse. You also can’t search, so you have to flip through everything to see if their is something you want to watch. Its not user friendly at all, mainly because the studios demand it. They may be upgrading it soon, but right now only Roku has a searchable interface that is in any way user friendly.
PS3 and Wii no longer need the discs to play movies. And in even awesomer news, PS3 now supports 5.1 Surround Sound on Netflix Instant Watch.
Holla!