Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
With all due respect your condescending tone is completely unnecessary and uncalled for. I'm just sharing my thoughts. Do you really need to talk down to me like this?

I'd like to see that interview you quoted if you know where I can find it online. That would be great news for me.

Why are 99% of the streamable movies garbage? Are you talking the quality of the streams or the movies themselves? I disagree if you are referring to the quality of the films. I recently added about 125 movies to my queue, all great films IMO, and about 20 of them were available for streaming.

What is the quality of the HD streams from your Xbox 360? On par or better than HD movie broadcasts from HBO, etc? If HD streaming is available now then why doesn't Netflix offer them on their website (with regards to the movies that are currently available for streaming)?

There are not enough recent movies available for streaming. Sure, there are some good movies, but many are bad are are not interesting to many people. I don't blame this on Netflix though. It's the movie studios.

HD quality on the 360 is great.

The interview I saw was on a local Phoenix news station a few months ago. I can't remember if it was NBC or Fox. I tried to look for it online, but I couldn't find it.
 
It's not a matter of even technically preparing the discs for streaming, but of distribution rights. The studios understand the video rental market. Streaming still scares them, which is why you usually only see catalog titles and even at that titles with a low residual value. Generally what you get on Netflix streaming is that set of titles where Netflix thinks there will be enough demand to justify conversion, storage and bandwidth costs, and the studios think the convenience of instant availability will turn them a greater profit than trying to force people into the far more lucrative DVD sales channel.

Thus a stupid RomCom nobody cared about two years ago in theaters and nobody is likely to buy on DVD might get enough eyeballs to be worth it if Netflix subscribers don't have to do any work to watch it, whereas posting Star Wars for streaming might cannibalize sales of next month's Super Special Platinum Collector's Edition on DVD, so you don't get that.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.