I finally got around to trying out Netflix’s (no longer) new Watch Instantly fea­ture. It’s a pretty cool setup con­sid­er­ing I’ve already had Net­flix for sev­eral years. With my cur­rent plan of three DVDs at a time for $16.99 a month, I get an unlim­ited number of hours of Watch Instantly movies. That’s a pretty sweet deal.

The only problem…It’s Win­dows only. Even worse, It’s IE only. That has pretty much been a deal breaker for me so far. I have a PC at home, but I don’t ever want to sit at my desk to watch a movie. My laptop is a Mac­Book Pro. I do have Boot Camp, but the whole reboot­ing thing has kind of turned me off in the past.

Ear­lier this week I installed VMware Fusion, which works with my pre­vi­ously installed Boot Camp Win­dows par­ti­tion. I finally decided to try out the Net­flix Watch Instantly. After spend­ing about 15 min­utes jump­ing through an unbe­liev­able number on instal­la­tions, run anyway dia­logues, yes I really do want to do that thing I just told you to do, one restart, and one unex­pected Inter­net Explorer error later, I was up and running.

I have to say, it looks really good. The inter­face is very nice (very Mac-​lke actu­ally) and the qual­ity is excel­lent. I was able to put the show into fullscreen and it still looked good. One con­cern that I do have though is that I’m actu­ally at work run­ning this over their ridicu­lously fast inter­net con­nec­tion. So, good qual­ity with no buffer­ing issues isn’t saying much. I’ll have to reserve fur­ther judge­ment to see how it works on the wire­less con­nec­tion to my DSL modem I have at home.

One nig­gling crit­i­cism I have is over this some­what dis­con­cert­ing dialogue:

The dia­logue shows up at the begin­ning of every single movie or show you watch. Con­sid­er­ing I’m using an entirely legal and paid for ser­vice, I kind of resent being pre­sented with a dia­logue box that starts with the sen­tence “You do not have the rights to play this file.”