If you have a spare couple hours, check this movie out. it’s one of my favorites — it was introduced to me by taylor. marcus shared this link with me.

Tampopo

So I was surprised earlier today when I logged into Netflix to discover the availability of streaming video content over the internet! While this doesn’t include very much content yet, it holds promise for the future. For subscribers to the usual dvd-in-the-mail plans, you get 1 hour of video stream for every $1 in your monthly contract. I have the 2 dvd at a time $15 plan, so I get 15 hours of streaming video a month. The quality is pretty damn good, too. It looks similar to dvd video played on my computer (albeit, it is a 4 year old thinkpad).

Netflix “watch now” currently requires windows (xp sp 2 or vista), ie6+, windows media player 9+. My standard comcast internet connection was sufficient for the stream.

I’m guessing they’ve got a pretty nice content delivery network (cdn) behind this thing …

Unfortunately, Netflix itself doesn’t carry much publicly available information (meaning to non-subscribers), but it appears that this faq is available:
http://www.netflix.com/FAQ?p_search_text=Instant_Viewing&lnkctr=FAQ