macnn/electronista
01/14/2008, 10:20am, EST
Monday, January 14thNetflix intros uncapped Internet movie service
Netflix has made official the expansion of its Watch Instantly program for movies to remove most of the restrictions, significantly increasing the company's influence in online movie rentals. Subscribers to all but the company's base $5 monthly plan can now watch as many movies online as they like from their PCs without an additional fee. Although not all movies qualify for the feature, roughly 6,000 titles are playable through the service. Previously, subscribers were not subject to additional charges but could only watch up to 17 hours of movies using Watch Instantly instead of DVD.
The announcement is timed just ahead of Apple's Macworld San Francisco keynote and places Netflix in direct competition with an anticipated iTunes movie rental system that is so far predicted to offer a different business model altogether from Netflix, choosing traditional per-movie rentals instead at $4 for a 24-hour period. The Netflix system is heavily dependent on Windows Media copy protection and is not transferrable to portable media players but is expected to step up competition yet again when Watch Instantly becomes available on an LG media hub, competing with a potential update to the Apple TV.
Filed under: industry, Apple
Other story tags: iTunes, LG, Apple TV, Netflix
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And this "add up your caps" crap? Before you could stop buy a gas station and once in a while you'd get a freebie song. Certainly, chances were about the same, but you didn't have to invest in 'X' amount of drinks to get a song. You could just radomly get a bottle, and get a free song. Now you HAVE to buy 5 drinks. It'll be interesting to see which gets people to buy fore bottles.
On that note, we can't really say which store, Amazon or iTunes, sells more soda. The "giveaway" models are different. It's too bad really, else something could be said about the results.
It's a balance between easy, compatibility, usability, cost, quality and what the movie companies will allow. May the best service win!