Netflix: Watch Now (and easily)

When you work with bleeding edge technologies, you tend to lose a lot of blood. Who of us hasn't had a frustrating experience with a new device that promised to make our life simpler (albeit via a very complicated path). Well today I wanted to share a good experience.

I spent much of the past two weeks on the road which (predictably) included about 15 hours in flight delays. In my ill-prepared haste, I had left without a book, DVD, iPod or other means of mobile entertainment. As I sat there under the flight info terminals, enlightenment suddenly hit me. I'm a Netflix subscriber and have access to a collection of online movies that I could conceivably watch on my laptop... would it work? I had only used the streaming 'Watch Now' feature once before and was unsure. I turned on my laptop, connected it to a free WiFi hotspot and within minutes was watching a nice Frontline documentary. The quality was good especially considering the fact that I was using an unsecured public WiFi network.

Mildly impressed, the icing on the cake came a few days later when I tried to finish watching the program. I booted up a different computer, in a different city, logged in, and the film started playing right where I had left off. Very nice indeed... I may end up trying one of the new Roku boxes at this rate.