Brian's Brain

One of the most important attributes of my job, as I mentioned a month ago, is to strive to maintain an open and flexible mind. With respect to the ongoing 'hot' topic of Internet- versus physical media-distributed video content, that job requirement means regularly testing content sources, delivery mechanisms and playback platforms. And specifically with respect to Netflix's Watch Instantly (aka Watch Now) service, that job requirement means that on the heels of testing Roku's Netflix Player and MediaMall Technologies' PlayOn, I've spent the past week-plus trying out Microsoft's Netflix playback client for the Xbox 360. Tough job, I know ;-)

Microsoft's Netflix support launched yesterday in conjunction with the New Xbox Experience UI redesign, which the company gave me early access to on one of my two Xbox 360 game consoles. It's the one in the living room, tethered to a 37" 720p LCD over an analog VGA video connection. Yesterday, post-NXE upgrade, I also added Netflix support to the game console upstairs in the bedroom, connected to a 28" 1080p LCD over HDMI and the same display my Netflix Player employs (therefore making A-vs-B image quality comparisons especially easy via my Radiient HDMI switchbox). In both cases, augmenting the game console with Netflix capabilities was straightforward; as with the Netflix Player, I visited Netflix's activation page (after logging into my Netflix account) and entered a multi-digit alphanumeric code provided by the game console.

As a reminder, here's the typical bandwidth my upgraded DSL connection supplies my LAN:

The downstream speed is unfortunately insufficient to support the 300 titles' worth of HD content that Netflix currently offers only for Xbox 360 owners (though Roku swears the Netflix Player will also have HD support by year end). However, as Gizmodo also recently noticed, nowhere on Netflix's website (at least that I can find) is an indication of what content is HD-capable. I'm frankly baffled by this oversight. Also, for anyone who's operating under the delusion that Microsoft and Sony have achieved détente, note that Sony has explicitly blocked access to content from its movie studio subsidiary Columbia Pictures on the console.

The Netflix UI both on the Xbox 360 and on Roku's dedicated player communicates expected video quality (as a function of downstream bandwidth) to the user by means of a four-bar metric (strictly speaking, four-dot on Roku's gear). Roku's Netflix Player normally gives me a three-dot measurement, occasionally popping up to four dots, and I've never experienced a playback buffering stutter in my many hours' worth of use to date.

Conversely, both Xbox 360s consistently suggest a two-bar quality metric, and several times over the past few days (mostly in the evenings) I've encountered situations where playback has frozen for several seconds and the game console has subsequently reported a degradation of Internet connection speed...and that it was adjusting (translation: degrading, in order to reduce bitrate) playback quality in order to alleviate the potential for subsequent disruptions. I strongly suspect the problem's not with my DSL connection but with overload at the Netflix server end of the pipe.

Comparing the standard-def two-bar game console playback quality on the Xbox 360 (both on the 37" 720p LCD and 28" 1080p LCD) to the three-dot quality on Roku's Netflix Player (over the latter display) provides some interesting contrasts and inconclusive results. Recall that the game console drives the displays at their native 720p and 1080p resolutions (conceptually similar to the way it up-scales first-generation Xbox standard-definition titles), whereas the Netflix Player outputs 480p and therefore relies on the circuitry inside the Hanns.G 28" LCD to handle the up-scaling duties. In viewing the resultant material from a short-range distance, the video delivered by the Netflix Player-plus-Hanns.G combo is noticeably softer than the content up-scaled to 720p and 1080p by the two Xbox 360s.

Softer isn't necessarily worse, though...the edge sharpening algorithms running on the game console accentuate not only valid areas of each frame's image but also compression artifacts (which, keep in mind, won't be as pervasive with higher-bandwidth Internet tethers) and other spurious pixel regions that a viewer wouldn't particularly want emphasized. The algorithms also produce 'interesting' (translation: undesireable) effects with actors' facial blemishes, for example. Which version of the video your eyes will prefer largely depends on your viewing distance; at close range, the sharpening over-emphasis is distracting, whereas at longer distances the flaws aren't as noticeable and the game console output seems 'crisper'. In both cases, however, either playback option is clearly preferable to that supplied by PlayOn, because MediaMall Technologies' software transcodes the incoming video to MPEG-2 in a predictably lossy manner prior to passing it on to the UPnP-cognizant destination.

From a content navigation standpoint, I should first reveal that I have a voluminous list of entries in my Netflix Instant Queue, some of which are even multi-episode television seasons (30 Rock, Jericho, The Tick...). While the Xbox 360's NXE UI is visually stunning, both generally speaking and specifically with respect to the Netflix client, I can't go directly from the top of my Netflix queue to the bottom of the list; getting to queue entry #79 (out of 87 total, at the moment), for example, is a pretty tedious process. With the Netflix Player, conversely, I can reverse-cycle from queue item #1 directly to #87 and backwards-navigate from there. And since the first-level menu for PlayOn (for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) consists of a series of folders ordered by content titles' first number or letter, navigating directly to a piece of material whose title I already know is therefore especially speedy and simple. Conversely, if I don't already know which Netflix queue item I want to watch, the PlayOn UI navigation process is slow and tedious.

Finally, let's look at the fiscal impact of all three Netflix Watch Instantly playback candidates. Recall, first, that content access requires a Netflix physical media-membership; the lowest-cost $4.99/month plan is capped at 2 hours per month of Watch Instantly service, while higher-cost plans (starting at $8.99/month) support unlimited online content streaming. Beyond that base cost, the Xbox 360 viewing option requires both the purchase of an $199.99-or-higher game console SKU and an Xbox Live Gold subscription: $50 (or less) per year, with 1- and 3-month Gold membership options also available. Conversely, Roku's Netflix Player is a one-time $99.99 acquisition. And assuming you already have an Xbox 360 (with, note, no Live membership requirement), PS3 or another DNLA-aware device, along with a Windows XP- or Vista-based PC, PlayOn is only $30...and it also supports other online sites such as YouTube and Hulu (including, in the latest PlayOn software iteration, Hulu member queue access).