How to get Netflix’s “Watch Now” (and why you want it)
- February 1st, 2007 /
These days it feels like an arms race in the battle of the movie rental companies, Netflix vs. Blockbuster. In December, Mike Arrington wrote why he was breaking up with Netflix, and I quickly got hip to the what Blockbuster was rolling out. I’m sure you’ve heard Alec Baldwin explaining how in addition to DVD’s through the mail, you can return your DVD’s directly to Blockbuster and get another rental on the spot. Plus you get one free rental coupon a month.
Between Mike and Alec I was convinced, and I signed up with Blockbuster in addition to Netflix. The single remaining factor was the speed of delivery, so my wife and I resolved to put the services to the test by returning two DVD’s from each service on a Monday and seeing what came back first. Needless to say, this didn’t help, because Wednesday four DVD’s showed up. We were in a dead heat and I was leaning towards Blockbuster, while my wife was loathe to break up with Netflix as she loves the interface and doubted we’d ever actually use the Blockbuster in-store service.
After two months we hadn’t used the Blockbuster in-store services, and then a week ago, David Pogue hit me with the holy grail. Netflix is starting to offer streaming movies. Wow, that is a great fit, and especially for us, as I have a Windows Media Center PC hooked to my TV right now and we’ve already been MovieLink early adopters.
So I began my mission to get access to “Watch Now” by Netflix. They are rolling it out 250,000 customers at a time, and it’s not set to be fully deployed until June 2007. I couldn’t wait that long so I gave them a call (1-888-638-3549 is the phone number for Netflix; they make it so hard to find). I told the rep I was a blogger and early adopter who had a perfect setup at home to give the new feature a whirl and blog about it of course. He wasn’t biting, but he did let slip a morsel of info on how I might get access. So here it is, listen carefully, how to get Netflix’s “Watch Now” NOW:
A couple times a week, Netflix is releasing an allotment of “Watch Now” allocations to people who are prepared to go digging for it. They won’t say when, it is in the morning each day they do it, and there are 10,000 slots available each time. When those are used up, it is turned off. (You west coasters might have to wake up early.) You can check each morning if the upgrade is available by clicking on the “Your Account” link and then looking for the link “How can I watch movies on my PC?” which is located on the right of your screen just below the “membership at a glance”. If it takes you to the generic page that says it will be enabled in our account over time, then try again tomorrow. But if it looks like this (like my account did today), then you’ve hit paydirt.
After upgrading my account this morning and watching the first 4 minutes of The Untouchables, the new Watch Now feature is looking great to me. Here are some initial thoughts:
- Time-metered access – you can watch a certain number of hours a month, based on your account level, rather than a number of movies. This means at an average movie length of 90 min, I’ll get 12 extra movies a month. I’ll never watch that many, but it sounds great.
- Bandwidth-based picture quality – there is a little meter that measures your bandwidth and shows you what picture quality you’ll get. Even over a wifi connection at the “basic” bandwidth level, the movie looked fine in full screen mode on my laptop, but I’m sure for the TV we’ll want a wired ethernet connection.
- Decent selection – there are about 1000 titles available, and I thought they’d be the dregs, but there actually are some movies we want to watch. As a comparison, iTunes only has about 250 movies currently.
- Only for IE – this is a pain, but not a deal breaker by any means.
There’s also a great video demo over at Hacking Netflix if you want to see more.
Good luck getting the upgrade. I’d love to hear your thoughts on if this tips the scales for you on the Blockbuster vs. Netflix arms race.
Feb 01, 2007 at 10:39 am
About a year ago I relocated from the U.S. to Costa Rica. One of the things that I really miss here is access to a large selection of movies. Granted, I could have NetFlix movies sent to our U.S. forwarding address but the turnaround time is really slow so doesn’t really make it worth the cost.
I myself have a macmini hooked up to my tv with broadband access so this definitely sounds like a service worth checking out. I hope it supports Mac
I can already imagine myself 20 years from now explaining to some young teenager how we used to have to go to a video rental store to get movies. How primitive.
Feb 01, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Thanks for the tip — I checked my account as soon as I read it, and turns out I’m in!
Feb 01, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Glad you got in Dave, I’m interested to see what you think. Van, thanks for the comment, I guess the Watch Now option makes tons of sense when the US mail isn’t exactly overnight delivery.
Feb 01, 2007 at 12:35 pm
This is some amazing sleuthing! I hope you didn’t bury the lead because people will find this fascinating about the secret 10k a day. Maybe you should bold that “How To” paragraph because it is pay dirt for anyone wanting this feature now. Like me! bk
Feb 01, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Thanks for the heads up on this. We did the same thing after all the buzz about Blockbuster. We put our Netflix account on hold and gave Blockbuster a shot. The movies came quick, we watched them, and wanted to tryout returning them at the store for 3 more. A few days later we got a phone call from the store reminding us to return them! Yeh, we forgot and got stuck with the restocking fee. I don’t like going to the store, we’re switching back!
Feb 02, 2007 at 6:58 pm
What an odd way to roll out a new product??
Feb 03, 2007 at 11:50 pm
I took your advice and tried both services. It was a dead heat after one week so I kept ordering. The next week again, they delivered the movies at the same time. So, at the end of the day, I dont know which is better. What I do know is now I have a crapload of movies at my house that I will never get around to watching….Thanks voodoo!!!
Feb 06, 2007 at 10:30 am
Voodoo Ventures - Idea Fuel Blog : Blog Archive : What’s Wal-Mart Up To? says:
[...] Wal-Mart announced today that it is the first traditional retailer to sign a major deal with the “Big Six” Hollywood studios to distribute digital downloads of their movies online. You may recall that we posted about Netflix’s offering of free movie downloads last week, so what we have now is a very broad spectrum with the free Netflix movies on one end, and Wal-Mart’s movies on the other. [...]