Why It Is Awesome
Streaming Netflix movies to your Xbox 360 rather than your PC is awesome because you can watch them on a nice big TV screen rather than on a computer monitor. The streaming is also very fast and convenient so instead of waiting for a download for a movie on the Xbox Live Marketplace or having to wait for normal Netflix movies to arrive in the mail, your movie will be started within a couple of minutes after you turn your Xbox 360 on.
What Do I Need to Start?
To use the Netflix streaming feature you’ll need a few things.
- First, you need a PC or a Mac or anything with an Internet browser. You can’t manage your movie queue on the Xbox 360 and will have to get online with a PC or Mac to select the movies you want to watch. Once they are in your queue, however, you’ll be able to pick what you want to watch out of those queued movies on the Xbox 360.
- Second, you need broadband Internet. The faster the better as quality will improve based on your download speed. It still works on slower broadband connections (1.5Mb/s, for example) but the image quality won’t be as good.
- Third, you need a Netflix subscription. Any subscription that has “Unlimited” in the title will work, so you’ll be fine if you just want the cheapest one which is the One-At-A-Time Unlimited plan for $9 a month. You’ll be able to stream older movies and rent DVDs of newer ones, which is a solid combination.
- Fourth, you need an Xbox Live Gold subscription.
Setup
Once you have all of the above, all you need to do is turn on your Xbox 360 and navigate to the Video Marketplace tab on the dashboard and then move over to the Netflix streaming tab. When you select the Netflix tab, you’ll be given a code that you need to input on the Netflix website at this page. This will activate your Xbox 360 as a Netflix streaming device and sync up your account. Now you just need to add movies to your Instant queue on the Netflix website and they’ll be ready to watch on your Xbox 360.
Other Important Things to Know
It is important to note that not every movie is available for Netflix streaming. There are thousands of available titles, but they generally are not newer movies. If you expect to be able to watch new releases, you will be disappointed.
What you will find is a great selection of older movies from any and every genre and era you can think of. There are also a lot of TV shows with full seasons available. More movies are being added all the time, and the intention is that every movie will eventually be available to be streamed, but they aren’t quite there yet. The service is still pretty darn good now, as long as you know what to expect.
