I am a happy camper today, for I now have Netflix Watch Now on my Tivo.

I read the story at around midnight last night, but the update hadn't made it to my machine yet. This morning however I checked and it was there, and after a simple confirmation on my Netflix account I was up and running, watching anything in my queue.

Pros:
- my home theater gets its internet through powerline networking, but this doesn't create any sort of bottleneck that I can see, and it's more than enough bandwidth to stream the HD content that's available
- the HD content looks fantastic! the only time there's noticeable quality issues is in large black areas. I watched the beginning of Pan's Labyrinth and you could see some artifacts in the dark areas of the underworld, but in daylight/bright scenes it looked perfect. I haven't seen blu-ray yet, so I can't compare it to that, but on my 60" 1080p screen it looked much better than upscaled DVD.
- streaming starts very quickly. in a matter of about 5-8 seconds
- you can remove movies from your queue from the Tivo interface
- none of this costs me anything extra with Tivo or Netflix, and it's not like this was ever promised to me when I signed up for either service

Cons:
- the single biggest problem with the service is the selection, but I have faith that it will get better. Besides, I think of the last item I mentioned under the pros: I didn't pay anything for this, and I wasn't getting it before, so for me it's nothing but positive
- the interface is pretty ugly. Tivo's interface is getting pretty old, but this one is worse. The bar that comes up when you fast forward and rewind is especially ugly. They could have just taken Tivo's bar and given it Netflix colors.
- speaking of fast forward and rewind, it's not very good, but it's about as good an implementation as I think you're likely to find on a streaming video service.
- you can't browse the watch now section of Netflix from Tivo. You have to use another computer to add items to your queue. Not the end of the world, and it's much easier to browse the selections from a computer anyway.
- the most annoying negative to me is that I see no way to tell which videos are in HD. The first indication you're given is when you start playing a video, and it starts buffering the video. at this point it tells you the kind of quality you're going to expect, and to the right it will either say "HD" or it won't.


Overall, I'm extremely excited about this. I prefer Netflix's model to any of the others (thought I know the studios don't), so I really hope they succeed. Anyway, I just thought I'd share. I've been looking forward to this for a month now, so this is an exciting day.

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On a larger topic, I'd be interested in hearing what the folks here think about the future of digital video distribution. I know we have at least one person here who canceled their TV subscription services in favor of iTunes, but I'd like to know what everyone thinks. Personally, I tend to think that blu-ray isn't going away anytime soon, but I don't think it has any hope of being the success that DVD was. On the other hand, it currently takes a lot more to get the average consumer access to digital downloads than it does for physical media, so I'm not sure how successful that will be until the process is simple.

Additionally, in all these debates I hear over this subject, I always want to ask the debaters the following: "okay, I've heard what you think the current situation is, but in an ideal world, what would you like to see?" So I ask you folks: what would your ideal system be, reasonably speaking?

Personally? My ideal system is possible right this moment, but the studios are the problem. My ideal is exactly like Netflix's current model, except with a selection matching their current physical media offerings. How great would that be? $20 a month and access to pretty much any movie you could think of? An even now, you can watch the current season of Heroes, much of it in HD. How much more can you ask for? But it's clear that the only road block is acceptance by the studios. Obviously the technology is there, I'm using it right now.

Sorry to ramble on so. This area is one of the most fascinating to me, from the consumer standpoint.