Microsoft’s upcoming update to the XBOX 360 will add the capability to stream from Netflix to the device, but I was intrigued when I read some positive reviews of Media Mall’s PlayOn which promises to let the user stream not only Netflix, but also YouTube, Hulu, ESPN and CBS and, eventually, others.
Installing the software on my server was a breeze and my Xbox saw the PlayOn server with no problem. Netflix streaming worked very well…I had no problems watching numerous videos in my Instant queue on the Xbox. You do still have to go the computer to add things to the Instant queue (I’m assuming the XBOX update will have some way of searching within Netflix).
YouTube also worked great. I was able to scroll through recent videos, top rated videos, my favorites and my playlists.
I had problems with Hulu. The PlayOn software wasn’t properly buffering the Hulu streams, so shows there drop after about 10 seconds. The PlayOn software is still in beta, so I’m assuming that’s some sort of bug that will be fixed by the time they get to release.
CBS and ESPN worked fine, but neither had any content worth watching (CBS, for example, didn’t actually have any shows but rather just short clips which is weird since some of the same content is available on Hulu.)
The thing I don’t understand is why Microsoft just doesn’t provide this sort of functionality to watch YouTube and other video sites natively within the Xbox instead of forcing users to go pay for a separate piece of software that then has to be installed on a Windows PC, etc.
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Man, Rokyu is getting hosed, aren’t they?
It will be interesting to see how many of those Netflix Roku boxes actually get sold. There are something like 9 million XBOX 360s sold in the U.S., and I’d bet an extremely high percentage of those are networked, so Netflix is in a sense giving those folks for free what Roku wants $99 to do.
An really, for just a dedicated video device are people really going to want *just* Netflix. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in at least YouTube in there (YouTube looks great on my standard def tv…not so sure about how it looks on HD).
I think the bigger issue is cable. I disconnected my the cable from my converter to my TV a couple weeks ago and I haven’t yet hooked it back up because I haven’t had any compelling need to watch cable — between Netflix, Hulu, Youtube and DIVX files, I’ve got a much better viewing experience than cable. If it weren’t for my grandmother who I take care of most of the time, I’d probably just cancel as much of the video portion of the cable as Charter would let me get away with (I think they make you subscribe to their ultra basic package in order to get Internet service).