It stills boggles my mind that they won't allow atleast some of those 12,000 movies in HD

they havent announced anything but the big reason is bandwith necessary to stream hd. thats the reason they dont do it already. more than likely we will need 5.0-6.0 mbit connections to handle hd. Ive got that but there are many who dont.

also as i understand it they havent upgraded to silverlight yet (still uses windows media player). i bet whenever the silverlight upgrade happens they will go hd then as well. (ces09 would be a good place to announce such a upgrade but i have no inside info or idea on when it will happen)

Thanks. I have googled myself to death trying to find an inch of info on it. When I say that ABC was going to let people stream shows in HD I was thinking it won't be long before netflix announces something. I also know it is much easier to stream a 20 minute show than it is to stream and 2 hr movie but thanks for sharing what you did know and I can get 5.0 mb with my connection so I am ready when they are.

hulu has HD streaming so Netflix can't be far off. I'd be surprised if it was free. They will probably charge a little extra for it. Bandwidth isn't free.

speaking of pricing i would almost rather they just break out the streaming feature on its own and have it be an option like the bluray addon fee.

something like $10-15 a month for a "stand alone" service (where you would not get dvd/bd's in the mail just the streaming version) and then have it be a $5-10 addon to any unlimited plan. this would also hopefully aid them in securing newer releases for the movies.

While I hope you are right and they can offer HD streaming as a low fixed price option I am not holding my breath.

Part of what makes disk by mail work is that there is a limit to how many disks you can get during a month. If it ships today, you get it tomorrow and watch it and then ship it back the next day that's a 4-5 day cycle.

If you stream a movie at 6:00 in the evening when you are done you can stream another one at 9:00 or 10:00 if you want. And on the weekends or weekdays spent at home the number of movies that can be streamed goes through the roof.

So, unless the system enforces download limits streaming can easily deliver 5-10 times as many movies as disk by mail. Assuming that the studios want to make money on this I don't see how streaming can be as cheap as you hope it will be.

Most of the existing services ( AppleTV, Vudu etc ) charge $5-$7 per HD movie. I don't doubt that NetFlix may be able to beat this but I don't know by how much.

Just my 0.02 worth ... Tim