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So I've seen a few of you guys using Netflix on the 360. How're you finding it? How's the content library? Will you be subscribing after the free 30 day trial?

I've been meaning to try it out just haven't had the time!

I'll be honest, I had very low expectations when I started up Netflix lastnight. Afterall, BBC iPlayer, ITVPlayer and More4 all have trouble running with my low internet speed, with regular 'buffer' stops, especially on longer shows eg. I missed the last episode of Sherlock and still haven't been able to watch it as it just will not load!

So yeah, it's fair to say I was expecting very little but boy oh boy was I surprised and, for once, in a pleasant way.

First thing's first, the library isn't great. That's not to say there isn't a lot of choice because there is but there aren't a great deal of new films or TV shows. Now, I imagine the reason for this is the fact that Netflix is only just launching in the U.K and is going up against the likes of Sky, Virgin & BT Vision, not to mention top TV channels most of which have their own catchup service now such as BBC, ITV, Channel 4 & 5 etc.

I imagine those listed above all have exclusivity on certain things, obviously first party TV shows such as Sherlock, Downton Abbey, Doctor Who etc. will all be exclusive to their respective channel, for a good while at least.

Having said that, there's still plenty here. I only had a quick glance through but I saw such popular TV shows as Misfits, Heroes, 24 and many many more. Movies wise there's also a good selection though, again, not as many newer releases (Which again I imagine Sky, Virgin and BT Vision all have exclusivity to air first after cinema screenings) but there's still a massive choice, on my quick glance through I saw classics as Con Air, The Sixth Sense and Enemy of the State (Which I ended up watching, will give feedback on my viewing experience in a sec) and that was without even checking the other 'channels' properly (Comedy, Family Friendly, Action and Horror are just some of the genre's available.)

So, on to my viewing experience. I opted on Enemy of the State having not watched it for a good few years, just fancied something quite mindless to watch before bed. I clicked play and it took a few seconds to load before starting. I was waiting for the buffer pause that was inevitably going to kick in after a minute or two of watching the flick. I've never streamed a movie via the net (I've streamed movies locally from the PC to 360, but that's completely different) but after my experiences when struggling to stream a half hour TV episode via iPlayer or any of the other catchup channels I honestly did not expect to see the movie all the way through.

So, it's fair to say I was simply delighted that I did not get one single buffer stop, slow down, de-sync or any other streaming issues whatsoever! Now, it's worth noting I could only stream in SD so I cannot comment on the HD quality and how well that streams on a decent connection but I was pleased with the quality of SD overall. There was the occasional artifacting, mostly when there were a lot of blacks on screen, but overall the quality was really good.

There's a little signal bar on the top of the screen that shows how many 'bars' you have, much like a mobile phones signal indicator and I did notice it drop to 2 bars once or twice throughout the film but even then nothing noticeable happened, no stuttering, no nothing.

I'm going to try watching some Heroes tomorrow night (Stopping at Charlotte's mums tonight) as I have never seen it and have been after watching it for years so depending on my experience with that (if it turns out to be as smooth and problem free as watching Enemy of the State was) I will most definitely be subscribing.

I know you could say that with most of the shows/movies being older that I could just go and download them for free and yes, that's true and, if I had a really good internet speed perhaps I'd do just that, if movies downloaded in minutes instead of hours. In my situation however it does take at least an hour to download a single movie, so the convenience of streaming them instantly with good quality even in SD is a no brainer for me, especially considering the price and the potential for library additions as time goes on.

So yeah, very very excited about it tbh. I wasn't fussed about it at all, didn't think it'd work on my poor net and I was proven wrong. For somebody in a similar situation to me I would highly recommend it.

Wow thanks for the extensive impressions Strite! That's awesome to know about the quality of streaming. I'd heard good things about it from US users but I'm pretty certain their net speed overall is better than ours.

What'll be interesting to see is how quickly the library grows. I know in the US they're meant to be pretty on-the-ball with adding content on a regular basis. Hopefully the UK service will have that same level of attention given to it.

I'll get round to trying it out this week and report back.

Watched a couple of movies using it on my PS3 tho. No problems. As Strite said, not much content really, although I guess its all preference. But so far so good.

Do any of you guys know how this works with proper hd stuff, how can it possibly stream the amount of data from a blu-ray or is it just heavily compressed?

It's 720p as far as I'm aware. I'd say a 720p film would roughly be around 3 to 3.5 gigs, so streaming that over the period of 2 ish hours wouldn't be that difficult. Obviously would depend on net speeds etc.