Netflix Releases Instant Streaming Disc to PS3

Today, I got the Netflix instant streaming disc for the PS3. I comes on a disc, and I had thought that it would be an installer, but it’s actually a player just like the DVD or Bluray that plays whenever you put the disc in.

I think that as a user, I would have liked it better if it was an application that I could install and/or delete and could get updates with but I also understand that Netflix probably didn’t want to shell out for the bandwidth that most of the developers have to do when it comes to selling on the Playstation Network. Not sure why it couldn’t have been some sort of installer though.

In any case, the real reason I set it up was to see how it compared to several devices that I had already. The best setup yet would probably be Windows Media Center, which allows searching for movies. The Netflix interface is slick and gives you not only the top 100 movies of each genre type that you’re more likely to watch, but it also loads pretty fast. It allows browsing through the “up to 100″ movies which is nice. I think it would have been more worthwhile if it also added the search toolbar, which would have been somewhat useful.

Outside of that, it is a little more feature rich than the Roku interface, and it seems to play the movies just fine. I did run into a problem at the get-go for my test with “Red Sonja” where the sound wouldn’t play, but that could have been a Netflix side issue, and not the interface passing through. We’ll see if it starts up again. If so, then there might be some QA issues with testing this first version of the disc.

I will say that activation with Netflix was a breeze. It took all of a few seconds for the code activation to sync up. Overall, the feel of this instant streaming client is pretty good and I believe is probably slightly better than the Xbox 360 version. I would still rank it behind the Windows Media Center version due to the lack of search bar, but even without that, I’m glad that it’s now on the PS3.