Remember when the only choice you had to make at the video store was VHS or Betamax? Well, if you're one of the millions of people who rushed to snag the video of "The Dark Knight," you know that life has gotten a whole lot more complicated. Did you buy the Batman sequel on DVD or high-definition Blu-ray? Did you rent it from Blockbuster or the corner video store? Did you download it from Amazon or, uh, acquire it from a file-sharing site? I used Twitter and Facebook to query friends and fans and, as expected, the answers were all over the map. "DVD … because I can rip it into an iPod-friendly format," said one. "Blu-ray—because my husband will no longer allow any other format in the house," another chimed in. There are so many different viewing options for movies and television shows, it's enough to wipe that smile right off the Joker's face.
Well, the decisions have just gotten tougher. The startup Vudu kicked off streaming high-definition video in living rooms, but now Netflix, the popular DVD-rental-by-mail service, can also send movies straight to your living-room TV, thanks to a number of set-top boxes that support streaming video in both standard and high-def quality (Netflix has been streaming movies to computers since early 2007 via its Watch Instantly feature, but watching them on your TV was a complicated affair). Among the set-top boxes that allow you to take advantage of the Netflix service: broadband-equipped TiVo devices ($149 and up), Microsoft's Xbox 360 ($199 and up), the Roku Netflix Player ($99; roku.com) and Blu-ray players from Samsung ($400) and LG Electronics ($350). When Microsoft announced the Netflix deal for the Xbox 360 at July's E3 Media Summit—a conference that's the equivalent of Cannes for videogamers—the excitement of my fellow joystick jockeys shocked me. I probably would have been more jazzed had I not given up my Netflix account a few years back—too many months of "forgetting" to exchange the old DVDs for new ones had persuaded me to sign off—but with an Xbox 360 and a 40-inch Sony Bravia TV in my office, I resubscribed so that I could take Netflix streaming video for a spin.
Now I understand what all the buzz was about. There's a lot to like about getting movies this way. In roughly the same time it takes to fire up a DVD, you can start watching "The Thing" or "Pan's Labyrinth" in all its high-def glory. (Sadly, "The Dark Knight" isn't available at all, because studios insist on charging pay-per-view prices to stream new releases, as opposed to Netflix's all-you-can-eat subscription fee.) All you do is click on a film title in your Netflix queue, and within seconds the DVD cover art shows up on screen, waiting for you to hit "play"; after a 15-second buffering period, the movie is rolling. Netflix's streaming high-def movies don't look or sound quite as good as Blu-ray, but unless you're doing a side-by-side comparison, only cinephiles will notice the difference. Another nice touch is that the service remembers where you left off, even after you shut down the machine. But here's the biggest advantage: for a monthly fee of $8.99 you can stream as many movies as you like. That compares with $5 to rent a Blu-ray disc—plus the $250-or-more cost of purchasing a Blu-ray player.
On the downside, only 300 of Netflix's 12,000 Watch Instantly titles are in high def. (A spokesperson says that Netflix is looking to expand that number, but declined to specify how quickly it would do so.) Also—and this is only a minor quibble—you can't organize the titles in your Netflix queue directly via Xbox; for that I had to use my computer. But by and large, Netflix can take care of most of my viewing needs. Now I can save my pennies for those movies whose visuals truly demand Blu-ray perfection. Like "The Dark Knight."