Netflix to Bring Its ‘Watch Instantly’ Service to Macs

Netflix has started using Microsoft’s Silverlight (a Flash-like web service) to allow Mac subscribers to watch streamed TV shows and movies instantly on Intel-based Macs.

Silverlight is a cross-platform media rendering engine that allows you to play audio and video within a web browser. Netflix will use Silverlight’s built-in Play Ready DRM (Digital Rights Management) capability to allow the playback of protected Netflix content on a Mac. You must have Silverlight installed and subscribe to the Netflix Watch Instantly service.

Netflix will offer the Watch Instantly service to Mac users in a staged rollout, which is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

I haven’t tried the Watch Instantly service, because it’s not available in our area yet. The idea of picking a movie or TV show from Netflix’s large catalog and watching it almost immediately is certainly appealing. I’m not sure about viewing quality, because it’s likely to be highly dependent on the quality of your broadband connection to the Internet.

If you use the Watch Instantly service on a Windows computer, let us know what you think of it.