The “instant viewing” program from Netflix — streaming video for Netflix subscribers — is supposed to be available to their entire subscriber network by June of 2007. I tried it out last night. It was awesome.

Netflix doesn’t yet have a particularly extensive collection in their instant viewing treasure trove, but it’s certainly substantial enough to provide items of interest for most audiences, with about 2,000 videos to watch across genres.

I watched a 45 minute television program at full screen on a monitor with 1400 by 900 pixel resolution. During the course of the viewing there were:

  • 0 sound glitches
  • 0 video glitches

The video quality was very acceptable for a TV sitcom. I’m not sure that I’d find something more exotically special-effects driven to be quite so satisfying, but that’ll have to be another test later! The relatively simple camera work and audio work of “Ballykissangel” were just fine.

The time between hitting “Play” and beginning to watch the video, including the download and install time for the Netflix video player was approximately 2 minutes.

Sweet. Now, if only Netflix.com were an accessible site…