Netflix Should Take the Next Logical Step

Earlier this year, Netflix began offering streaming movies on its website to its online DVD rental customers at no extra charge. Right now, it is offering about 1000 streaming titles, but plans to offer as many as 5000 by the end of this year. Each subscriber gets six hours of streaming video per month for each DVD they can have out at a time. For example, those with the three-out-at-a-time plan get 18 hours of streaming video per month.

Unfortunately, these movies can only be watched on a PC. People enjoy watching short video clips, like those that can be found at YouTube, on their computers. However, surveys have shown time and again that most people aren't interested in watching full-length movies and TV shows on a PC.

Netflix needs to take the next logical step and find a way to get those online movies from a PC to some type of set-top box so viewers can watch them on their TVs. And it shouldn't be some kind of standalone box -- it needs to be integrated into something that people are already using, like a cable, satellite, or telco TV converter or a DVR like TiVo. That's the holy grail of Internet video. TV viewers had grown tired of constantly adding new boxes to the top of their sets.

Until Netflix takes this step, its new streaming video library will not make much of a splash with its subscribers.