As I write this, I’m watching The Comedians of Comedy using Netflix’ “Watch Now” feature. They’ve had the service available for awhile now, but this is the first time I’m trying it.

The service itself is pretty good. It’s IE7/Windows only, which makes it annoying. Getting started was fairly painless. I had to free up a fair amount of space on my HDD to use it (perhaps the 5+GB UT2K4 installation has something to do with that), and I had a few false starts where the DRM thingy wouldn’t download properly, but it eventually worked. I don’t know if the DRM authentication is a one-time thing or if I’ll have to do that for each movie I watch. All that’s involved is clicking “OK”, but on general principle, it’s annoying.

Once all that was squared away, things worked quite well. I think it’s using Windows Media Player behind the scenes, and runs either within the browser window or fullscreen. It’s no HD, but there’s no skipping or rebuffering either; I’d put the quality somewhere between a VHS and an early DVD.

I was a little disappointed with the selection; I’ve got about 150 movies in my queue but only four or five of those are available to watch online. I’m not sure what Netflix has to do to get permission to make movies available, or if they have to rely on the studios to provide digital versions, but I assume the selection will be expanding.

I like the way they determine how much you can watch—for every $1 you pay per month, you get to watch one hour of stuff per month. That seems pretty straightforward and fair.

Oh, and the movie? It’s pretty good. If you like Patton Oswalt or Brian Posehn, it’s a good bet you’ll enjoy the movie.