streaming-video

Netflix has brought its streaming video to the United Kingdom and Ireland, marking a new challenge to Amazon and its competing Lovefilm service.

The service costs 5.99 pounds ($9.24) per month in the U.K. and 6.99 euros ($8.88) per month in Ireland, Netflix said today.

Expanding internationally is not simple, because content providers such as TV and movie studios require new deals for new geographic regions. Netflix has been bulking up its distribution deals in recent months, and now it's got a sizable list of allies for Ireland and the U.K.: All3Media, the … Read more

People are increasingly using their game consoles for more than just playing games.

Thanks to the greater availability of Netflix, Hulu, and similar services, streaming videos via a game console has grown in popularity over last year, according to a study from Nielsen released yesterday.

Surveying more than 3,000 people in the U.S. in October, Nielsen found that video streaming now accounts for 14 percent of all time spent on Microsoft's Xbox 360, 15 percent of time spent on the Sony PlayStation 3, and 33 percent spent on the Nintendo Wii.

As a whole, time spent on … Read more

Do you own a Roku box? How about a Web-connected HDTV or Blu-ray player? Or any other device that's compatible with Amazon Instant Video? If so, today is your lucky day.

You can get a $5 Amazon Instant Video credit when you link that player, TV, or box to the service. The entire process takes all of 2 minutes, and the credit is good for anything in the Amazon Instant Video store: movies and TV shows, and both rentals and purchases.

Here are the deets from Amazon:

1. Register an eligible Amazon Instant Video-compatible device with Amazon Instant Video … Read more

To my thinking, the most interesting aspect of Amazon.com's new Kindle Fire tablet is not the hardware, nor even the price. It's Amazon Prime, the $79-per-year service that delivers, among other things, video and e-book content to the device.

That $79 outlay may seem like a lot, but let's crunch the numbers a bit.… Read more

For those who aren't Hulu Plus premium subscribers, the Hulu Plus app for Android offers only a tiny taste of the popular Web site's video catalog. A link on the Home screen leads to all of the free content (which is not much), while pretty much every other link eventually leads you to a premium member log-in screen.

Meanwhile, for paying Hulu Plus subscribers, the experience is quite a bit different. The app opens up to a dashboard with all of your basic functions: TV, Movies, Queue, History, Search, and More. The More icon leads to Favorites and … Read more

After initially launching for only a select few devices (five to be exact), the Netflix Android app is now supported by most phones and tablets running OS versions 2.2 and up. This means a lot more people get to partake of Netflix's instant-streaming fun.

After downloading the app, getting set up is simple. Just enter your log-in information and your account will sync with your device. Your viewing history, recommendations, and instant queue will all be intact.

Along the top of the screen are four main navigation tabs: Home, Genres, Search, and Queue. The Home tab displays your … Read more

The trouble with trying to adapt a big and growing business to disruptive technologies is that the process is... well, disruptive, as Netflix has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt.

But "disruptive" doesn't mean "impossible," and it's way too soon to count Netflix out--although that hasn't stopped Wall Street from trying.

Since announcing yesterday that it shed 810,000 net subscribers in the third quarter, the purveyor of DVDs-by-mail and video-by-streaming has been the goat of Wall Street. Its share price plunged 35 percent today, to $77.37, knocking a cool $2 … Read more

Netflix's leadership has decided not to follow through with a plan to spin off the company's DVD-by-mail operations.

What that means is the service, called Qwikster, is dead, at least for now, barely three weeks after managers disclosed their intentions. It also means Netflix customers get something akin to their old service back, the one that enabled them to go to one site to watch videos streamed over the Web as well as order DVDs for home delivery. Netflix, however, didn't back down on price; access to movies streamed over the Internet as well as DVD rentals … Read more

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos served notice today that his company is very much a Netflix competitor.

Some analysts predicted that Amazon would not make a serious effort in online video distribution. But at a press event in New York this morning, Amazon kicked Netflix where it hurts the most right now: price and value. The Web's largest retailer announced a series of new electronic readers as well as a tablet computer called the Kindle Fire (See CNET's first look at the device). Amazon wrapped the tablet into a hard-to-beat offer for many movie fans.

Not only is the … Read more