Mean Girls is worth a look if you’re a fan of Tina Fey. Not 30 Rock, but watchable.
The Hellboy animated movies are available.
Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are available. I’ve been watching them and they’re quite good so far.
Edit: apparently this has already been noted.
You two should hang out.
I watched an episode of YM and it’s a bit like watching Barney Miller again. I don’t know exactly what that means, but for some reason both shows are in the same mental category for me.
I am enjoying the hell out of the first two seasons of 30 Rock, but every time it loads up it says ‘Presented in HD’, then about fifteen seconds into it it stops and reloads it in a slightly lower quality, claiming my connection slowed. I think it’s trying to send it to me at 5 mbps and is dropping it down to 3 after the reconnect. Somewhere between real HD and DVD. Is there anything I can do to get it to stop trying the HD? It’s deal-with-able, but it’s a little annoying.
I don’t have any recommendations yet but Netflix on the 360 is the greatest thing ever.
I can now officially give this generation of consoles to Microsoft. (At least in the US). Once this catches on they’ll be unstoppable.
This will be huge once some decent movies are on it. Right now, the selection is spotty, to say the least.
I’m now able to instant queue all these TV series I never got to on my mail queue. Also, I can take a chance on what could be a shit movie because I don’t have to wait 2 days for the next one. This is an amazing feature, and I’m shocked I don’t have to pay extra for it.
And yes, once the selection is expanded… I’ll never use On Demand again.
Bingo: Streaming > Blu-Ray.
But I still need to find some way to cover up the ethernet cable I’ve strung up between my kitchen and living room… :O
I gotta say, this service really rocks.
Heads up for those planning on seeing Yes, Minister (which I haven’t watched since I was a kid), Yes Prime Minister, and any Red Dwarf or Coupling episode: Those all say they are set to expire on Dec 1st. So I might have myself a BritCom marathon this Thanksgiving.
Sounds like their deal with the BBC must be expiring then. I hope they fix that. (MI-5 and Doctor Who also expire then.)
I noticed that they’ve got District B13 (parkour!), Night Watch (and less importantly, Day Watch), and The Professional.
I started using PlayOn to stream other stuff (hulu, cbs, and certain sony netflix titles) and it’s pretty good. In fact, it makes the xbox netflix almost superfluous, though I don’t know if they support HD like the xbox one occasionally does (depending on whether its available and whether my comcast connection is living up to my expectations).
I would add that this 3rd party program also works with PS3–if the PS3 plus PlayOn experience is comparable to the xbox one, then I would say that the PS3 has an edge given its BloRay capability (forgive me I’m bitter over HD DVD’s demise).
I’m hopeful that there will be more online streaming episodes available. I’m curious how much money NBC would earn from each alternative: me watching 30Rock on netflix w/o ads; me renting 30Rock on DVD from netflix; me watching 30Rock on NBC.com (or Hulu) with ads; and me buying 30Rock on DVD.
For me, clearly the cheapest option in terms of time is watching on Netflix, moneywise it’s NBC.com, and the physical DVD options (renting or buying) are both not competitive in terms of their monetary or temporal costs.
It’s an interesting world, but I’m glad that there seems to be multiple ways to watch this stuff for now. At some point in the future, they may kill the golden-egg geese somehow (ie stop licensing to Netflix or Hulu), but for now it’s improving nicely. Certainly they’re providing a compelling alternative to Bittorrent, which wasn’t the case last time I was watching the Amazing race (didn’t watch last season, so 2 seasons ago–we kept missing or screwing up the videotaping, went to bittorrent to get the missed episodes–after a while we got addicted to the higher quality of the downloaded episodes that were in HD and commercial free). I would note that the cbs.com offering of Amazing race is not HD, but the commercials are relatively unobtrusive and short, and (most importantly) it’s streamed so the family can make a spontaneous decision to watch the show–I’d have to anticipate and download well in advance otherwise.
Anyway, we’re watching the hell out of the xbox. Nico and the wireless drum kit are getting lonely.
I still can’t believe I haven’t watched Casablanca or Dr. Zhivago on netflix yet. I was tres bummed to find that “the lives of others” is controlled by the SonyStyle (stasi?).
I have an impressive string of “not availavle on Xbox” up and down my instant queue. Score one for corporate pettiness. Withholding “Crumb” and “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2” has proven some sort of point, I’m sure.
I’ve used PlayOn and it’s decent but the 360 integration I find much better. Also the quality when using the 360 integration seems much higher. Plus keep in mind that PlayOn isn’t always going to be free, I believe it is right now as it’s in beta.
I’m new to NetFlix, but the button under Dexter is a red “Add” not the blue “Play now”. Which tells me it isn’t available for streaming. Hopefully I’m doing something wrong.
The service is cool but the selection SUCKS.
Absolutely not worth my $9/month right now.
PlayOn isn’t even free during the beta - they give you a trial period, which they occasionally have reset to make sure you can see some fancy new feature (like Netflix support). But it’s something like a one time $30 registration, so if you get a lot of use out of it I think it’d be an easy investment to make.
And you don’t ever want to subscribe to Netflix just for the streaming. It’s nice when something can be streamed, but the reason to subscribe to Netflix is their insanely comprehensive and quickly shipped DVD collection. (And BluRay).
So an interesting thing just happened. Sometime during my viewing of a MI-5 series 2 episode, everything on my instant queue that was unavailable on Xbox suddenly popped up on my Xbox queue. Not only that, but the BBC series that were marked as going away on December 1 no longer have any special notation.
It looks like some of the movies have been freed up, but not all of them.
Season 1 of Twilight Zone, season 1 of MacGuyver and the whole run of Action are now available. Action! Now there was a show that was too good to really make it. Now they just need to air Profit.
Oh, and LK, if you like documentaries…
Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room
Taxi to the Dark Side
Paper Clips
Dark Days
Yeah. Looks like everything but Sony ‘blockbusters’ like Spider-Man 3 and Surfs Up have been opened up.
Looks like they fixed it. I had a bunch of BBC documentaries up for expiration on December 1st and now the expiration date is gone. MI-5 expiration date is also gone.
Also for you Star Trek: TOS fans, not sure when this slipped in but Season 1 is now up. Maybe they’re trying to drum up interest before the new movie?