 Tonight Netflix Posted This Notice Tuesday, Netflix will announce streaming movies for Netflix subscribers. The company will start the service this week, rolling it out to about 250,000 customers per week until all 6 million subscribers have it available – which should be by June 2007. Watch Now will make about 1,000 of its approximately 70,000 movies available for instant streaming at no additional charge. For example, subscribers who pay $17.99 per month to keep three movie rentals concurrently, will now get an additional 18 hours of free moving watching per month. Subscribers with lesser plans will get fewer free hours. Conversely subscribers with premium plans will receive even more streaming hours. Watch Now will use Microsoft DRM and require XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista. It will also require IE 6 or higher. We think this sounds like an excellent first step into digital movie downloads by one of our favorite services. Free is always welcome and should really bolster the rate of adoption. Windows DRM is unfortunate as it can sometimes be cumbersome, however it's not a surprise and it can be done effectively. According to Netflix, after a browser applet installation, you can begin playing movies in as little as 10 to 15 seconds. Movies can be paused. and users can dynamically jump to different parts of a movie. Quality varies with Internet connection speed. Watch Now requires minimum Internet connectivity of 1 megabit-per-second for Internet-sized clips, with 3 megabits-per-second required to watch movies at DVD quality. Can the bandwidth-challenged U.S. Internet deliver enough 'tubes' to satisfy Netflix customers real-time? Netflix
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