Digital Home Thoughts: Netflix and Microsoft, Sitting in a Tree...

"An exciting new home theater experience is coming to living rooms this holiday season. At E3, Microsoft and Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to your television via Xbox 360®. Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets you instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. This movie-watching innovation will be available to Xbox LIVE® Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers, and will let those users enjoy streaming movies from Netflix on Xbox LIVE at no additional cost."

Now that there is an official, sanctioned way to stream from Netflix to the 360, it looks like come this fall I'll be upgrading to Xbox Live Gold and switching over to Netflix. The only thing that had been keeping me with Blockbuster, despite their being more expensive than Netflix, was the ability to trade in movies directly at the store. Frankly, the ability to stream over 10,000 items directly to my 360 outweighs the ability to periodically make a swap for a free in-store rental.