An exciting new home theater experience is coming to living rooms this holiday season. At the E3 Media and Business Summit, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) , the world's largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer consumers the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the television via the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system. Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets users instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. This movie watching innovation will be available to Xbox LIVE Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers and will let those users enjoy streaming movies from Netflix on Xbox LIVE at no additional cost.

A growing library of more than 10,000 movies and TV episodes will be available from Netflix when it launches on...

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Good deal for xbox bad for netflix and consumers. Why limit your market netflix? Why leave PS3 users and wii owners out? Another example of microsoft using their clout to monopolize a market.

Maybe to early to tell but does anyone know the HD capability of this offering?

There is currently no Netflix HD streaming.

Looks like Sony beat them to the punch by several months, and with HD. Just one more reason to buy a PS3.

Cue the Sony haters........

akirby wrote:Looks like Sony beat them to the punch by several months, and with HD

Sorry akirby, I have to clarify your comment. It appears as though you are comparing the Xbox/Netflix deal to the Sony PS3 Movie downloading. This is not an accurate comparison.

If you want to make an accurate comparison, you should include the fact that Xbox's equivalent to Sony's recent "Movie Download" announcement is the service they launched in November 2006. Microsoft has been making movies and TV shows available for download in SD and (720p) HD since then. So technically, they beat Sony to the punch by almost 2 years.

The Netflix deal is not a replacement of Xbox LIVE's movie service, it is in addition to the services they already offer.

Thank you for allowing me to clarify,

- Shane

Sorry about that - I'm not familiar with Xbox and the press release sure sounded like it was a new feature altogether until the last paragraph. They should have put that one first.

No worries.

If you want to know more about other services, and how they compare, check out the article I published on the subject 3 months ago: A Comparison of Movie Download Services.

I will be publishing an addendum to this soon to include DirecTV On Demand, Sony PS3 Store and probably Netflix Watch Instantly service.

- Shane