New content to watch instantly

Hi, Brent here with some news about movies & TV episodes that are available to watch instantly. Today we announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices that you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the end of the year. Movies include “No Country for Old Men”, “Ratatouille,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Superbad,” and more. You can see all the newly available choices here.

Recently we also added a lot of new CBS, Disney and NBC TV episodes including of CSI, NCIS, Numbers, Jericho, Hannah Montana and Heroes.

You can watch these online on your PC or your TV via a Netflix ready device. Netflix ready devices include the Netflix Player by Roku, which is available now, the LG BD300 Blu-ray Network player, which will be available in a few days, or the Xbox 360, which will instantly stream movies from Netflix later this fall. And, for all of you Mac users (of which I am one) we’ve been busy working getting a solution that will allow you to watch instantly on your Mac. So hang in there - we’ll have something for you by the end of the year.

Enjoy the new stuff, and let us know what you think.

Announcing the Netflix API

We're pleased to announce the availability of the Netflix API. The team has been hard at work on this and we're glad we can finally let people see what we've built. The Netflix API allows access to data for over 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well Netflix account access on a member's behalf. The Netflix API gives developers the ability to create new and novel applications using Netflix data for Netflix members or movie fans in general. This API is free to developers and commercial uses are allowed.

Why are we doing this? Because we have limited resources and we can only work on so many items at once. We hope that by opening up our APIs we will enable the creative desires of other developers to make a variety of wonderful applications. We expect to see different movie finding approaches, queue management tools, mobile phone applications, social network applications, the integration of Netflix information and capabilities into a variety of other applications, and more. And that, in the end, will further delight our members and other movie watchers in their quest to find and watch movies they'll love. For more detailed information, see Michael Hart's API blog post on the new Netflix API Developer Portal. You can always reach the developer portal by clicking on the "Developers" link in the footer of any Netflix page or by going directly to http://developer.netflix.com.

Netflix to Break Guinness Movie Watching Record

Chris Garrity from the Netflix communications team here to announce the Netflix Movie Watching World Championship. Starting October 2nd, Netflix will host eight competitors from around the globe in New York's Times Square in an attempt to break the existing world record for continuous movie watching. The 8 competitors include the current record holder, Ashish Sharma of Mathura, India. Mr. Sharma will be on hand to defend his record of 120 hours and 23 minutes. Netflix has also given the public a chance to participate in the contest by submitting video auditions at the Netflix Movie Watching World Championship page on Facebook. For more information on the event, become a fan of the facebook group and receive up-to-date information on the competition including contestant videos. Enjoy the enclosed promotional videos for the event.

LG Electronics BD300 is impressive

Hello, Steve Swasey here. I'm vice president of corporate communications for Netflix. Last week I joined one of our technology partners, LG Electronics, to show off their new BD300 Blu-ray disc player.

Recall Netflix and LG Electronics announced their partnership in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. In July I joined LG at a sneak peek of the BD300 at LG's "Summer Line Tour" in New York, at which we provided some details about the product.

Last week LG formally rolled out the BD300 at the CEDIA show (Custom Electronics Design and Installion Association) in Denver. I spoke at the LG news conference to a standing room only crowd of journalists and bloggers. You've probably read the reviews so I won't repeat details here, except that the BD300 is sleek.

Foot traffic was heavy at the LG booth, with a lot of people interested in seeing this first and only Blu-ray disc player to instantly stream movies from Netflix. Of course LG set up demo units with some pretty impressive wide screen TVs. "Billabong Odyssey" never looked so good.

The BD300 will be available at retail in about three weeks for $399.00.

Good stuff.

"Long Wait" Queue Hiccup

Hi, Kevin McEntee here. I’m in charge of engineering for the Netflix Web site. We had a hiccup on the site today. For about 2-1/2 hours, from about 11 a.m. to about 1:30 p.m. Pacific time, every movie in everyone’s Queue showed “Very Long Wait.” This was caused by a change we made in our database yesterday that inadvertently impacted the whole site today. Shipping, receiving and Queue adds were not affected. There was no connection between today’s event and the hardware issue that prevented Netflix from shipping DVDs last month. We’ve added more circuit-breaker and audit protections in the system to protect against this from happening again. In short, nothing happened today except some confusion about when your movies would be available, which was quickly corrected.

Netflix Developer API Links & Information

The Netflix Developer API has only been out about a week, and there are a number of interesting things for developers interesting in creating Netflix-based applications: Michael Hart, director of community engineering for Netflix, was a guest on the Social Web TV show, and talked about the Netflix API: Joseph Smarr (also in the video) has posted a step-by-step guide on how to use the Netflix API. Bill Scott, director of user engineering for Netflix, has posted the slides from his presentation at the Ajax Experience Conference last week: Hacking Netflix - Netflix APIsView SlideShare presentation or Upload your...

Netflix Promises Watch Instantly for Mac This Year

Back in July Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told HackingNetflix that Watch Instantly would be available for the Macintosh in Q4 of 2008, and Brent posted the following update on the Netflix Blog: And, for all of you Mac users (of which I am one) we’ve been busy working getting a solution that will allow you to watch instantly on your Mac. So hang in there - we’ll have something for you by the end of the year. I highly doubt that Apple is going to license FairPlay to a competitor like Netflix, so I'm betting that they're working on...

FeedFlix Adds Rental Alerts

FeedFlix, a free website that helps you track and analyze your Netflix rentals, has added a new alerts feature that will warn you when you've kept a movie past a certain number of days. If you haven't watched a movie in a week or so, you might be better off returning it and getting something you're more interested in viewing.

Netflix CEO Speaking at The Conversation in Berkeley

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings will be giving a fireside chat about the future of movies at The Conversation, a conference in Berkeley on October 17th & 18th.

Netflix Envelope Ad Promotes GameFly

This week Netflix is promoting GameFly on DVD envelopes, so if you're waiting for Netflix to add video game rentals, you're probably out of luck. Are you using GameFly? What do you think of the service?