Netflix's Watch Instantly now on Mac! Closed Captioned? Not!

Yeah, I was really excited about the Watch Instantly feature finally being available on the Mac when I first found out. It is currently in Beta so this is where I'll provide my feedback. A couple of things worth talking about:

Netflix computes your bandwidth and figures out which movie quality to send you. This is actually very nice, it sets your expectations on how good the video will look based on how fast your internet is. I have somewhat slow internet so I get the Basic Quality most of the time. Today my internet was faster so they streamed a higher quality video for me. This is determined automatically. The basic quality is pretty similar to the YouTube quality... well, maybe a little better.

The Watch Instantly library is pretty limited to several thousands of movies that no one really watches anymore. But give it time, the list will grow and Netflix struck some recent deals with television studios such as Starz.

While a lot of streaming movies and TV show web sites are adding Closed Captioned features, Netflix has pretty much ditched us Deafies on this. I understand that studios have the option of providing CC content for the internet and such but Netflix is responsible for providing the technology to allow CC to work on it's streaming video players. So Netflix, we all know you're pretty much the last to do this so pull some strings will ya?

Wait, the snapshop above has closed caption!? Yeah, I figured that while I wait for the CC to be implemented I'll just explore the foreign movies genre where most of them are English Subtitled anyway. I normally don’t watch foreign movies so maybe I’ll discover a newfound interest.

So for all you Mac users with a bit of free-time check it out!

Lance