Now, I owned my Xbox long before the Netflix app was available. My friends bought it for me one Christmas several years ago because they were moving out of state so we could keep in touch. At the time I was skeptical (why would I want to get dominated online playing against tweens who were vastly superior at video games?) but in time I’ve grown to love the little white joy box in my living room. Skepticism aside, I would have run out and bought one myself immediately after Netflix launched their application to stream movies to your television.

The streaming video service is free to Netflix subscribers and uses all your current account (movie queue) information. This means that you don’t have to do anything special besides the one-time configuration when you download the app to your Xbox and your queue is immediately available. Now, not all Netflix videos are available – the last number I saw was around 12,000 movies & television shows – but I can tell you firsthand that Netflix is busily adding new content all the time. Random movies from my queue pop up on the Xbox app from time to time, which is truthfully akin to having random extra birthdays (I get excited easily, what can I say?).

In addition to constantly adding new content, they just released an update on the Xbox that adds cool new functionality like having the ability to watch videos in a ‘party’ – which means that I can watch terrible movies and offer MST3K-like commentary with friends in other states. Thank you Netflix, for removing the distance barrier from sharing terrible B-movie experiences with friends! I hear other things are either in the works or here now, like the ability in the app to choose from streaming movies not currently in your queue.

So, to wrap up this absurdly long blog post:

1. I’m a gamer.
2. Netflix + Xbox 360 = “teh awesomes” [its misspelled on purpose]
3. Streaming video, even in its infancy, it’s pretty pervasive.  And it’s only going to get better!

Fun fact: in Joystiq’s August 2009 interview with Steve Swasey (VP of Marketing for Netflix), Steve stated that “…more than one million Xbox gold members have watched more than a billion and a half minutes of movies and TV episodes via the Xbox 360.”