InstantWatcher.com – TV Guide for ‘Watch Instantly’
If you’re spending as much time on Netflix Watch Instantly as I am (thank you Roku!), you’ll really appreciate this site: InstantWatcher.com. This very clever mash-up takes content from the Netflix API and marries it up with the YouTube API in order to show clips; it also uses the NYTimes’ movie reviews API to give you reviews and recommendations of the films available in Watch Instantly.
My favorite trick of InstantWatcher might be the “expiring” feature, which tells you what movies to hurry and watch before they fall off the Watch Instantly service.
InstantWatcher the brainchild of Daniel Chao, who has also developed the site KindleFeeder.com for Amazon Kindle users. Which, of course, I covet. (The Kindle, I mean.)
Roku Rocks
Something I’ve wanted since the holidays is what I’ve wistfully referred to as “the Box” — the Roku Netflix Player, which is designed, essentially, to connect your TV to your broadband cable connection so that you can view Netflix’s Watch Instantly movies and TV shows without cabling your computer to your TV. 
For a few years now, I’ve been connecting my MacBook to the TV probably at least a few times per week, first to stream iTunes content, then, later, to watch a fair bit of Hulu, then to watch Amazon On Demand. The service changed frequently, particularly when we wanted to watch a particular show — Battlestar Galactica — because the rights situation with BSG kept changing…first you could buy it on iTunes, then it was gone; then it was free on Hulu, then the number of back episodes was cut down serverly; finally, it was easiest to just buy Season 4 on Amazon and stream it over the MacBook wired up to the TV.
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Netflix Player in Beta for Mac
This is a big deal…Netflix is moving from a DVD-based service to a streaming based service, and the lack of Mac support up until now has been a stumbling block. Now, though, there’s a beta of the Netflix player for Mac!
This could be big — if Netflix can figure out how to charge (and make money at) offering a fixed-rate streaming service that would give you access to high-quality movies and TV shows, it could be a strong competitor in this space. I’m already a huge fan of iTunes downloads, but just think if you could take it a step forward and download from a massive catalog at a monthly rate…if they can pull it off, I might just have to get the Rokr box instead of the Apple TV I’ve had my eye on.
To make it work, you need to visit http://www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin and opt in to the beta program. (This also means you’ll have to use Microsoft Silverlight for watching in Windows, apparently, so if you do often watch in Windows from your Netflix account, you might want to wait a while.)
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