Unanalog

I've subscribed to Netflix since february 2001, and I've really enjoyed the service. Great website, great selection, great customer service, what else can you ask for? Well, last year we started hearing rumors about their online streaming service, was this the holy grail for movie enthusiasts, easy (legal) online access to a huge library of movies? It seems the dream is coming true. With this feature recently out of beta, all subscribers should now have the "Watch now" tab on their home page, which lets you access the selection of movies ready for streaming (not all Netflix movies are available online yet). What else can you ask for? The answer is probably "not much", if you happen to run Windows and use Internet Explorer! So of course, that doesn't work too well for me unless I want to watch movies at work. But fortunately I own an Intel Mac, and have Parallels. Setup was a breeze: just say yeah yeah yeah to the ActiveX installation alert boxes, let IE acquire the DRM rights, and you're good to go. Performance seems acceptable, with only a few dropped frames here and there, and with no audio glitches at all. The picture shows an IE window running Parallels in Coherence mode, which doesn't seem to affect performance. Using the full-screen mode of Netflix Movie Viewer made the playback and little choppier, and the refresh didn't seem uniform across the screen, with refresh "bands" appearing, which can probably be attributed to the lack of graphics hardware acceleration in Parallels.
This is the first time in two and a half years I really miss something that's available to Windows users only. I can't use this solution on my Powerbook laptop, but for the moment, I'm quite happy with the fix Parallels offers. I doubt we can expect a Mac version anytime soon as the service is relying on Microsoft DRM. I hope I'm wrong...