While we're on the topic of abusive relationships with game consoles, I've been profoundly disappointed with the Xbox 360's crappiness at streaming video. The original Xbox, after you got it modded, was the greatest media center known to man, so going from that to no streaming anything ever sucked ass. Oh all the technology was there, but you could only stream .WMV files. Raise your hand if you've ever willingly downloaded a WMV file. Ok, you're a Microsoft employee, stop reading this blog and go play with your Zune. And fix user control caching in AJAX UpdatePanels too!
But those of us who aren't owned body, heart, and soul by Bill Gates download divx/xvid Avi files. And to get them into a 360 readable format required a several hour long conversion process, and the result looked like you were trying to watch over the air TV with a broken antenna. Then TVersity came out, which basically converted your stuff to WMV on the fly. It worked, but it raped your computer's CPU and looked even worse than manual conversions. And you couldn't fast forward or skip around at all.
Then they announced that the 360 dashboard was getting an update to play divx files! Except you needed a Windows Media Extender, and you had to do it through Media Player on your computer, which was a huge pain in the ass. It took me over 4 hours to do it, and I actually knew more or less what I was doing. It worked ok but Vista's firewall would keep blocking it so you had to do a lengthy process every time you wanted to use it.
Then last Thanksgiving came around. Another dashboard update, but this time it would let Netflix subscribers use the Instant Streaming feature directly to your 360. And sweet zombie jesus, it works! And it works perfectly. It's trivially simple to use, has a slick enough UI, and the video quality is great If your internet connection is fast and stable it's roughly DVD quality with minimal buffering times. It not only lets you skip around easily, but remembers how much you've watched. So if you load up a TV show, it'll show a list of titled episodes with synopses and show which ones you've watched and which you haven't.
The selection is pretty good, and getting better every day. I think there's also a similar deal with Sony so you can probably do it on your PS3 too. I'm a horrible netflix user, I've had Krzysztof Kieślowski's Colours trilogy out for almost 9 months while still paying fees. But this retroactively makes all that money I've blown worthwhile.
And what's the first thing you should watch?
Seasons 1+2 of 30 Rock, naturally, available in HD!
