I logged into my Netflix account today to find that I am one of the lucky ones to get access to the new service early. The new service shows up as a new tab on your account webpage. I didn’t go thoroughly into the movie offerings, rather I chose one off the main page that I liked. My choice was ‘Black Rain’ and I wasn’t disappointed at all at least not with their service. I will get into what went wrong several times afterwards. The first time you launch a movie you are asked to install the Netflix software on your system, which is automatic once you agree. The movie is then queued up and you are asked to obtain the play rights for the file. After you hit yes and hit play the movie then queues up for play, which happens pretty quickly. I think from the time I hit play to the movie actually playing was a matter of 3-4 seconds. The image quality was excellent, better than I expected. I am fortunate enough to have a fat pipe (30mbs down) and thus could stream at the highest settings. You have options on the main page to select the level of quality for those who might be bandwidth challenged. Below are links to several articles that discuss the service in more detail.
Gizmodo: Hands On the Netflix Download Video Service: Thumbs Up
Hackin Netflix: Breaking: Netflix Launches “Watch Now” Downloads
I almost forgot, the problem I had was with Vista constantly crashing if I fast forwarded through the movie. I am not chalking that one up to Netflix rather to Vista and the lack of any really stable drivers for the hardware I am running. You would figure if you had top of the line components they would have stable drivers. Not so as many of the NVIDIA faithful have found out the hard way. Driver status for NVIDIA hardware is just plain pitiful at the moment.