Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Netflix seems to be doing things right when it comes to the streaming game, partnering with several hardware companies in an attempt to make its service more or less ubiquitous -- a pretty sharp break from the proprietary hardware approach taken by most of its competitors. That means Netflix subscribers have quite a few choices when it comes to streaming, and we thought we'd put the ones available now head-to-head and try to crown a winner. The good news? There isn't a mediocre choice out there. The bad? Well, read on."

I've been using the Roku box for a while now and find it pretty impressive and should be wrapping up my review soon. Sounds like they are all pretty good and the decision as to which is best really comes down to personal preference and how you plan to use it.

"Thanks to a special blessing from the folks in Redmond, we've had an opportunity to thoroughly give the rejiggered Xbox 360 Dash (AKA, the New Xbox Experience) a serious run through, and we've got the lowdown on the future of your gaming life. As you probably already know from the numerous posts we've done and generally available info (Microsoft has been pretty forthcoming with this stuff), the Xbox team has completely revamped the Dash experience, giving the system not only a visual overhaul, but trashing the underlying tech and rebuilding things from the ground up. The result is a beautiful, intuitive interface which loses almost nothing from previous versions while adding a considerable new feature set to the mix. Read on for our first impressions."

A total reboot for the Xbox 360 Dash, and I'm liking what I'm seeing. It appears a TON of work went into this new version. I've been very excited about the addition of the Netflix streaming, a feature that will finally have me upgrading from Silver to Gold. I was even more excited to see down in the tidbits, that Netflix will also be supporting HD streaming to the 360. November 19th can't get here soon enough for me!

"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.