Netflix’s streaming service, ‘Watch Instantly’, is becoming a bigger part of the company’s offering all the time. It’s adding 300 independent films to its lineup and boasting that almost half its subscribers now use this part of the service.
Watch Instantly
Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ is the streaming service that comes free as a part of the DVD-by-mail subscription. And it’s a growing entity, becoming more popular and being added to more devices all the time.
Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’, with its 17,000 movies and TV episodes, is now available through a number of source, including the PS3 and Xbox 360 games consoles, and it could be coming to the Wii soon as well.
The last we heard of the service was early in January when Netflix announced a controversial new deal with Warner Bros. that sees DVD releases delayed by a month but more titles offered up for streaming. Which suggests where the future of Netflix lies.
Indie Film Bonanza
Netflix today announced new deals with film distributors The Criterion Collection, Gravitas Ventures, Kino Lorber, Music Box Films, Oscilloscope Laboratories and Regent Releasing which will see around 300 independent movies added to ‘Watch Instantly’.
While 300 titles may not seem like much to write home about, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has stated that it’s more about adding quality and longterm content than quantity for the sake of it at this point in the company’s history.
Approaching 50 Percent
These new content deals come just a few days after Netflix announced it had added over one million new subscribers in the last quarter of 2009, making a total of 12.3 million users.
Of these 12.3 million users, 48 percent now use the streaming service. This compares to 41 percent three months earlier, and 28 percent a year ago.
This is surely due to the number of prescient devices ‘Watch Instantly’ is now available on. In fact, this could also have had a big impact on the number of people subscribing to the DVD service in the first place.
Netflix expects to have its streaming service available on more than 100 consumer electronics devices by the end of this year.
Conclusions
is growing stronger by the day, both on the DVD side of things and the streaming side of things. And I can’t see the growth slowing down anytime soon. My only complaint is that Netflix is currently only operating in the U.S. If ‘Watch Instantly’ went global then I’d sign up in a flash.
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