I just got the e-mail today indicating that Netflix shipped out my disc for the streaming goodness. Im pretty excited, and have been waiting for this ever since the 360 got it.

I would love to have the option to have that "theater" like the 360 has where I can watch movies with others. My sister has the PS3 and Netflix, and that would be cool for all of us to sit back and watch ridiculously stupid movies and laugh about them together.

I can't wait to try mine out! I have a shipping center about 35 miles away from me near Bush IAH. Hurry, hurry!

This might be the "Theater Experience" you are wishing for.

http://www.siliconera.com/2009/11/03/scea-patent-shows-plans-for-mystery-science-theater-3000-style-interactive-tv/

Mine's about five miles away...SO CLOSE!!!

I just wish Gamefly was this close...

Edit:
That's exactly what Im talking about! I would love to have that kind of experience, just sitting back and laughing about horrible movies with friends.

Can't wait for this! But does anyone know how the picture quality will be? I'm a total picture quality whore / obsessive / bluray fan, and I'm not sure I'm really going to appreciate streaming for anything more than deciding whether to rent things I'm not certain about. And maybe certain older (and poorly transferred) movies which don't have all that much resolution to begin with.

I will let you know tomorrow after I get the disc in and check it out.

If it's as good as streaming netflix on the 360 then you should have no problem...Heroes Streams in HD for me just fine. I as well cant wait for the PS3 netflix, I already canceled my gold account since i was paying Month by Month JUST for netflix streaming...

Cool! My disc is supposed to come today, so hopefully I'll find out this evening!

I just finished watching a movie!

I clicked on "Bolt", it was the first title displayed. It played beginning to end with only a 10 second pre-cache pause before it began playing. No pauses, buffering stops or problems in playback.

Quality was about equal to an upscaled DVD. Netflix streams the movie in 480p. I saw a little pixelation in the backgrounds of some scenes that could be due to the files being compressed.

Software is very easy to navigate. It offers the items in your Instant Queue and the 100 most popular items in a few select categories. I could not find a "Search" feature. If you want to stream something that wasn't a major hit or a popular TV show you will have to add it to your Queue on the Netflix website.

Yeah, I agree with ya Grommy. The quality is awesome...much better then when I tried to watch streaming vids on my laptop. No skips, no buffering pauses...its like watching a regular DVD.

My biggest concern with it is that you cant search the entire streaming collection...only the things that you already added to your instant queue. All in all, Im not complaining...Im loving it, and I definitely look forward to using it more.

the xbox 360 version started with your queue ONLY. you still only get a limited collection (most likely the same as PS3). we're always browsing online anyway so i don't think that's a big deal at all.

that's good to hear the PS3 version is pretty solid as well.

OK, I've now used it enough to have a fairly good feel for how well it works.

I watched all of Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, and the quality was quite acceptable. I have a feeling that the DVD probably looks a little better, but it's a documentary with a lot of archival footage, and the new stuff is just talking-head interview material that clearly wasn't ever visually remarkable in the first place, so whatever visual quality penalty there was didn't really matter. The service did its job by getting me to watch an excellent movie that I might never have actually bothered to move to the top of my queue and see otherwise.

I watched a few minutes of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, and it was like looking at the movie through a dirty windowpane. Soft, blurry and generally awful. I haven't seen the movie in any other medium to provide a basis for comparison, but if I really cared about watching this title, I'd find the stream completely and utterly outrageous, and I can't imagine that the BluRay isn't vastly superior. Even the standard DVD release must be a huge improvement.

And I started Flawless, the recent Demi Moore / Michael Caine heist film, and much to my pleasure, it streamed in HD, not just anamorphic SD like the other two movies! The quality wasn't up to the level of a well-mastered BluRay, and there were hints of artifacting here and there, but all in all it was really good, and very watchable. I imagine I'll finish it streaming instead of taking up a disc-at-home slot on it.

I wouldn't want to watch a really important and visually excellent movie like this, but for everything else, if it streams in high-def or isn't very visual to begin with, I think I'll be happy. The question is, how do you know what's available in high-def until you start playing it? Unless I'm missing something (which is certainly quite possible) I don't see any indication.

As far as general usability goes, the interface is clean and intuitive and gets out of the way. I like the fact that there are a bunch of category tabs in addition to my Instant Queue (which is already populated with about 150 movies as it is) and a list of things I've Recently Watched, but it really, really, REALLY needs a search feature. Without search, it's like riding a three-legged horse. And did I mention that they really need to add search? Because they REALLY need to add search.

Oh, and when I removed Z Channel from my instant queue after finishing it, the movie didn't actually get removed from my queue, but I'm sure that's easy to fix.

im curious, after you use the disc for netflix on the PS3, do you always need it in there? or is it an install thing. I assume when it rolls out with a PSN update you won't need the disc anymore.

For now, you need to use the disc whenever you want to stream something from Netflix. A little inconvenient, but really not a big deal IMO. I believe that sometime next year we're supposed to get a firmware update that will do away with the disc entirely.

Yup, they say it should be out sometime early 2010, but for right now the disc must always be present when using Netflix in the PS3. Its one of my only complaints about the whole set up, but its more of a lazy factor than anything, so like Mac said, its not that big of a deal.

What about audio quality? That's been my biggest complaint with my Roku box. While there are some movies in HD video, there's still no 5.1 audio available.

I cant vouch for any HD or anything fancy like that (since I have yet to get an HDTV), but the audio sounds as good as it normally would from my TV, as if I was watching it on a channel or DVD rather than streaming.

Sadly no, it turns out it's just Dolby ProLogic-encoded stereo. The issue isn't the Roku or the PS3 or the XB360, it's the signal Netflix sends. (Well, not having one, I don't know whether the Roku is capable of supporting 5.1, but certainly the PS3 is.) Supposedly they're working on adding 5.1 sound in the future, but I don't know how soon that'll happen. So as an addendum to my earlier post, I'll note that I won't be watching any sound-intensive movies via their streaming service either until they add surround. That said, it's still great for older movies, documentaries, and high-def stuff for which surround isn't that important.

That also said, I really resent the fact that they're charging me $5 extra per month to be able to rent BluRays from them even though only a small percentage of their library is in BluRay and I often have to wait longer to get a BluRay than I would to get the SD DVD version of the same movie. Their argument is that BRs cost more than regular DVDs, but while that's true, SD DVDs used to cost a lot more than they do now, and my Netflix bill hasn't even remotely tracked with the average price of DVDs. (Not to mention that BRs are more durable than DVDs and thus presumably need to be replaced less often.) Furthermore, they're spending a FORTUNE on their streaming infrastructure, and they're not charging a penny extra for that.

Thats lame...I had no idea they charged an additional monthly fee in order to rent Blu-Ray. Can you stream Blu-Ray for free at least, or is it just if you want the actual disc?

Well, you can stream some movies in high-def, apparently, but not as many movies as are out on BluRay, and the quality isn't as high and of course there aren't any extra features if you stream. So yeah, for a lot of movies I want to get the actual BluRay disc in the mail.