Oh! Gizmo

This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net

In case you missed it, Microsoft released their dashboard update for the Xbox 360, dubbed the New Xbox Experience. Now those of you that also happen to subscribe to Netflix may have noticed something else. Upon trying to stream certain movies, you may have been greeted with a message stating that the film you are trying to watch is currently unavailable. Here’s the least surprising part of the whole thing. All of the movies which are currently unavailable happen to be from Sony Pictures Entertainment. Coincidence?

Lets see, what motive would Sony have to pull their catalog of films from being streamed to the Xbox 360? That’s right, they don’t want owners of a competitor’s product to enjoy it any more than possible. We know this to be true, since all films in question are still available for viewing via your PC and other streaming devices, just not the Xbox 360.

This really only makes Sony look bad. For them to pull their catalog of films right as the NXE is being launched is just plain underhanded. They’ve obviously known that their movies were going to be streamed to the 360, so why wait until now to pull them? So the question now is if they will ever allow their catalog to be streamed to Microsoft’s console. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

VIA [ GamerFront ]

This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net

When the New Xbox Experience launches next month, 360 owners will have the opportunity to stream Netflix movies to their console. This is something we’ve known for some time, and is honestly one of the things I look forward to the most regarding the dashboard update. However, it seems that they’ve been holding out on us.

Not only are we going to be able to stream Netflix movies on our Xbox 360’s, but we’re going to be able to do it in HD. When the NXE goes live on November 19th, Netflix will also be launching their HD streaming service, which will work with the 360. According to sources, there will be over 300 movies available in full HD when the service launches. If you don’t have a Netflix account already, I’d highly suggest signing up and taking advantage of this.

Source

By Luke Anderson

The battle of the HD formats ended quite some time ago with Blu-ray coming out on top, but how well is it doing? Well we recently learned that Netflix was going to begin charging a $1 per month premium to all Blu-ray subscribers due to high costs and a lower demand than expected. Well the online rental giant has released figures on just how many users are taking advantage of their Blu-ray offerings.

It seems that over 500,000 customers are getting HD movies delivered to their mailboxes on a regular basis, which accounts for around 5.7 percent of their 8.7 million subscribers. I suppose that isn’t too bad of a figure, though it shows us that DVDs aren’t going anywhere for quite some time.

VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Luke Anderson

I still haven’t upgraded my movie collection to Blu-ray, for several reasons. First, only in the last year or so have I finally rid myself of every last VHS tape in the house, and don’t really feel like moving on to a new format. Second, Blu-ray players are still too expensive to justify the purchase of one (I have no desire for a PS3). Finally, I’m happy paying less per disc when I go to purchase a new movie. One alternative to skirt around the last issue has been to just rent movies from Netflix and avoid the premium. However, now it seems that you’ll need to pony up some extra cash every month for that privilege.

Netflix has begun sending users who rent Blu-ray titles an email stating that they will be imposing a fee of $1 (plus applicable taxes) per month. No, that extra dollar isn’t going to break the bank, but it is a sign that Neflix hasn’t made back their investment into the format. Recently, Netflix CEO Barry McCarthy stated that only a fraction of subscribers rent Blu-ray titles. Sounds like I’m not the only one that’s holding out on upgrading.

VIA [ Ars ]

By Luke Anderson

I’ve been a Netflix subscriber for around a year now, which means I watch a lot of movies. When they started letting me watch streaming movies for free, even more of my time was spent watching movies. That is until I switched over to a Mac. See, the Netflix player has this one tiny requirement, which is that you have to use it inside of Internet Explorer. That’s bad enough on a Windows machine (Firefox all the way!), but damn near impossible on a Mac (unless you happen to also be running Windows inside of it).

Well it seems that the guys over at Netflix have heard the cries of the Mac-loving community, and are hard at work on making their software compatible with Apple’s OS. According to a recent announcement, you will be able to stream movies to your Mac by the year’s end.

[ Netflix ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com

I am a big fan of movies; especially HD movies form my PS3 Blu-ray drive. I was glad when Blu-ray won out over HD DVD, not so much because I liked Blu-ray better, I was simply glad to see one format win despite the fact that I am now stuck with a worthless HD DVD player.

Now that Blu-ray is the standard, we are starting to see players with some cool features show up. LG announced an interesting player called the LG BD300 Network Blu-ray Disc Player. The BD300 does everything you expect a Blu-ray player to do like play full 1080p resolution Blu-ray movies, upscale standard DVDs to 1080p, and it supports BD Live.

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