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LG & Netflix Team Up to Offer Downloadable Movies on TV
eldavojohn writes "It might seem like they've come full circle, but the movie injection method has gone from TV to mail to online download to TV on demand. And Netflix & LG are betting it's going to be a hit. They're also betting you will want to buy yet another device for your home theater. A Wall Street Journal article notes: 'The partnership between Netflix, Los Gatos, Calif., and South Korea's LG represents another gamble by technology companies that video from the Internet, which is commonly downloaded to personal computers, will go mainstream when users can easily access it from TV sets. So far, Internet television products such as Apple Inc.'s Apple TV have largely been unsuccessful, stymied by a poor selection of videos, complexity of use and other shortcomings.'"
Not so, says I...
You can currently watch some netflix movies online and it streams them perfectly fine over my RoadRunner connection.
Let Apple make their locked down AppleTV, these guys can probably make a standalone device which does what the netflix movie stream on demand does... only they had better get more selections.
Interestingly enough, my Cable Company (Verizon FIOS) does that with their Video on Demand service. The surprising thing: The movies from Netflix look better than the VoD movies which seem to suffer from an excessive amount of compression. The only advantage of the cable company is that their movie start streaming right away instead of waiting until it is downloaded. I've also tried Amazon's Tivo integration service and found the quality to be somewhere in the middle, although it too suffers from the need to download the whole movie before it is played.
I'm normally pretty forgiving of stuff like macroblocking and other such artifacts on my video, but the Verizon one was muddled enough that it was difficult to see what was happening in dark scenes and the blocking was really distracting during action scenes.
I read the internet for the articles.
As of right now, I can only do this on my Xbox 360, my PS3, my Tivo, and my computer. Just the other day I was thinking "Man, I just wish I had yet ANOTHER way to do the same damn thing!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
TVU Networks has a peer-to-peer streaming application, that works fairly well, too. So technically, it can be done.