TiVoShanan has posted the promo video she did for Netflix on TiVo, which appeared on the TiVo itself to announce the feature launch.

The $100 Roku video player, often referred to as the Roku Netflix Player, or just the Netflix STB, will have to change its reputation. No longer just a client for Netflix streaming, Roku is adding Amazon Video On Demand to the system. That’s certainly a nice bonus for those who’ve purchased the system as Amazon VOD has an extensive library of newer content which is generally missing from Netflix. Unlike TiVo, which offers Amazon content as download-to-view, the Roku box will stream the video.

Picked up from Gadget Lab at Wired.

A year ago LG Electronics announced a deal to bring Netflix streaming content to their set-top boxes, which materialized on the BD300 Blu-ray deck. Now LG and Netflix are taking it one step further, by enabling streaming right to new LG HDTV models.

The new ‘Broadband HDTVs’ will support HD Netflix streaming directly over their built-in Ethernet connections. These new LCD and plasma HDTVs, along with five new Blu-ray players and home theater systems, will join the BD300 in LG’s Netflix-enabled lineup.

The press release is below:
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LG Electronics announced they’d be bringing Netflix to their Blu-ray players just in time for CES 2008. That support shipped in the form of the BD300, announced in July and shipped in the fall. Now, just in time for CES 2009, LG is announcing their next additions - CinemaNow and YouTube. YouTube seems like an obvious move, it is showing up on just about every connected device out there. Pretty soon I think YouTube will just be a default feature on any networked device, which should make Google happy.

But the real interesting addition here is CinemaNow, and not so much that it is being added but how it is being added. CinemaNow will be streaming to the Blu-ray players. That’s very interesting - as far as I’m aware this is the first indication we’ve had that CinemaNow was adding streaming support to their content. To date CinemaNow has been all download-based, not streaming, including on TiVo. Right now on TiVo only Disney content is available from CinemaNow, but it has been stated that additional content would be added. Since TiVo supports streaming, as used by YouTube and Netflix, I have to wonder if CinemaNow content will also be available via streaming on TiVo.

In general we’re certainly going to be seeing more of this kind of thing, adding content sources to devices to make them multi-function. Just to support Blu-ray content and to comply with the BD-Live specification a Blu-ray player has to be capable of decoding MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 video in high definition, as well as handing a number of audio formats. The hardware used to do this is more than capable of handling most online video formats. BD-Live requires an Ethernet connection and 1GB of local storage, which is plenty to handle streaming buffers. And the BD-J programming environment allows for complex applications. It makes a lot of sense for Blu-ray players to pick up additional features like streaming video to make them more competitive and appealing to consumers.

Press release:

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TiVo’s Stephen Mack sent me the following statement about the issues some of you have reported experiencing with Netflix streaming.

Folks, thanks for your patience and we apologize for the launch issues that some of you have experienced.

Volume has been much higher than anticipated. We’ve been working around the clock to resolve these issues. As part of the solution, we are quickly moving to add more capacity to the system.

Our entire team will be monitoring closely tonight, and over the last few days we have put in place measures that should improve performance and stability. However, we know that tonight some of you will continue to see failures (although the problems should be less frequent).

If you do see problems, we ask that you try again later. We do expect that starting tomorrow, we will be able to fix performance and you will no longer see these issues with any regularity.

In a separate issue, some of you have reported issues with particular videos, such as lip sync issues with a show such as 30 Rock season 1 episode 1. We believe these issues are related to the video assets and we are working closely with Netflix to correct any bad videos as quickly as possible. Netflix does have a list of videos with known issues that have been reported, and they are working as fast as they can to correct all of them. In the meantime, they request you contact them to report any problems you see with a particular video. (If a video always skips or breaks up at a certain point, no matter what time of day, that’s most likely a bad video issue that only Netflix can address.)

We know you’re excited to use the Netflix application — we are excited as well and we apologize for these problems. I’ll keep you updated here on the forums with our progress in correcting the issues. Thanks again for your patience.

Best regards,
Stephen

I’m sure TiVo and Netflix will get these issues ironed out soon. It isn’t unusual to have some teething issues with the launch of a new feature. But this is such a high profile feature that I’m sure fixing the issues will have a very high priority.

Ever since the abortive first attempt was announced four years ago there have been on-again, off-again rumors of TiVo and Netflix working together again. They finally got it over with and released the tension in October by announcing a new deal. At the time they indicated the service would launch soon - and they were right, it is launching today!

But they have one more surprise up their sleeves - high-definition content! From the press release (below) it looks like they’ll be launching with some HD content available to stream to TiVo. As stated previously, the Netflix service is only available on broadband connected TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL units. The Series2 platform unfortunately is incapable of supporting the video codec Netflix uses. Only the newer units have the required hardware, sorry, that’s just how it is. It isn’t like Series2 units don’t have options - Amazon VOD, CinemaNow/Disney, and Jaman are all available.

This is likely why the HD units started getting the new software revision last week, to prep them for the launch of Netflix.

Press release below:

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Right now at Amazon you can save $100 on the Samsung BD-P1500 and BD-2500 Blu-ray players.

That means that the Profile 2.0 / BD-Live BD-P1500 is only $199.99, a fantastic deal on a full featured player. And that’s not all, if you’re also in the market for an HDTV you can buy one of ten Samsung HDTVs and this player and save $200 - you get the player free. Very nice.

Alternatively, the Profile 2.0 / BD-Live BD-P2500 is $299. What do you get for the extra $100? Internal Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD decoding (both models can bitstream) and 7.1 audio analog outputs (the BD-P1500 has only 2.0 analog outputs). Not a big deal if you have an A/V receiver with decoders, since the BD-P1500 can bitstream the formats over HDMI, which is more convenient anyway.

But that’s not all, the BD-P2500 is also one of the Netflix streaming Blu-ray players. And it not only streams Netflix video, but it will soon support Netflix’s new HD streaming video. Since the dedicated Roku Netflix player is $99, for the price of a BD-P1500 and a Roku box you get all of the functionality in one box.

Well, it looks like Home Media Magazine was right, Blockbuster is releasing their own set-top box. Well, like Netflix partnered with Roku, Blockbuster is partnering with 2Wire. The 2Wire MediaPoint digital media player is currently available for free if you pre-rent 25 movies for $99, or, another way to look at it, is you get the box for $99 with 25 free rentals. So at least they’ve done the right thing in matching Netflix’s pricing.

I didn’t think the Netflix STB would be successful, and frankly I’m still a bit skeptical in the long run, I think the real strong part of their service is their partnerships with TiVo, Samsung, LG, Microsoft, etc. It is a lot easier to sell a service for boxes already in homes then to sell new boxes. Unlike Netflix’s subscription-based service, Blockbuster’s service doesn’t require any subscription, it is strictly pay-per-rental. Which may appeal to those who don’t rent movies often enough to warrant a subscription. Another difference is that the Blockbuster service is a download service, not streaming like Netflix. That means users get full quality, no matter their broadband connection speed. On slower connections the rentals will simply take longer to download. And they can be downloaded in advanced and watched later.

While Toshiba officially pronounced HD DVD dead back in February, movies have still been available from Netflix for users to rent. But not anymore, well, not after December 15, 2008 anyway. Effective December 15, 2008 HD DVD will no longer be available from Netflix, any HD DVDs still in your queue will automatically be converted to DVD. Just one more reason to switch to Blu-ray.

TiVo CEO Tom Rogers appeared on CNBC to talk about the new Netflix offering and a few other points.

Picked up from TiVo Blog.