Cindy's family gave us a Netflix subscription for Christmas, along with a Roku Box. The idea is pretty nice: you pick a movie, they send it to you, and you send it back when you're done in an envelope they provide. Rinse and repeat as often as you want, with (usually) a 3-day delay between sending a movie out and getting the next one. And if you want more movies, there's a streaming service with quite a wide selection of movies. Throw in a couple of bucks a month, and you can get Blu-Ray disks instead of DVDs.
So far, we've only tested the streaming part (the first bluray just arrived), and the streaming quality is quite impressive (close to DVD). You can watch from PCs, XBoxes, special streaming boxes, etc. Unfortunately, the quality is noticeably worse on a PC compared to, say, a streaming box, so to get good quality you have to get another device. The Roku box we got for Christmas has both a wired and wireless connection, and hooks up to the TV through HDMI. It's the size of a DVD drive, and yet somehow manages to outperform my quite powerful desktop... go figure. Online forums claim it's intentional - piracymania or trying to sell more streaming boxes - or perhaps few people use their HDTVs as computer monitors. A guy at Netflix said the difference was due to Microsoft's Silverlite (DRM streaming tech like Flash) not being capable of HD video
Either way, it's good stuff... lots of movies to pick from, both streaming and by mail in high quality. The Roku box seems to be a keeper, and claims to be able to do lots of other streaming as well. Seems to manage Pandora well enough...
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