Netflix is apparently streaming more than half of all “Play-ready” HD titles to Macs and PCs, that according to a Netflix representative who spoke with HackingNetflix. But finding that “half” of HD titles available to stream in high-definition isn’t exactly easy.
If you go to the “Watch Instantly” queue on Netflix.com and roll over the title of the movie you will find a description of the movie, actor and director credits, and available formats. We found a couple movies on the homepage that indicate the movie is available to stream in HD, but the majority just say “streaming.”
According to Netflix, the “HD” format for streaming titles is 720p. But after searching for a way to confirm the HD quality on our PCs we gave up. (This is easy to confirm when streaming to your HDTV or media box — for example on the PS3 just press the “Select” button.)
What’s interesting too is that the story from HackingNetflix said half of all HD titles were available to stream in HD. But we found many that were only available in DVD format to be available to stream in HD — for example “How Much Do You Love Me?” (2007).
A scan of the streaming homepage titles revealed out of the 35 titles only 4 were available in HD – and the majority of those were Foreign. Here is a quick scan of the genres as broken down by Netflix:
Inspiring Dramas
None
Goofy Movies
None
Foreign
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days – streaming (HD Available)
Let the Right One In – streaming (HD Available)
Oldboy – streaming (HD Available)
New movies to watch instantly
Tornado Valley – streaming (HD Available)
We should note that no Starz Play movies were available to stream in HD as far as we could see.
Hopefully Netflix will give us some clarification on how to view the HD versions on our PCs and Macs. For those of us who output from the PC to an HDTV this would give the quality quite a boost. We may even be able to read the credits.
