New XBox Live Experience + Netflix = Awesome!

Now, I hope this doesn’t set the tone for this blog, this being the first entry of any sort of substance, but I just tried out the new XBox Live Experience with Netflix, and it really rocks.  Normally, I hope to write interesting things about writing software.  But anyway…

I work at home a good bit and I have multiple children, ranging in age from 2-17.  The 17-year-old can handle herself, but when their Mom is teaching the older kids, the little ones can sometimes be underfoot and somewhat undermine the teaching process.  I don’t generally advocate babysitting by the “tube”, but at times it can return some sort of order to a chaotic situation.  With the number of child-friendly videos available on Netflix (really, I was surprised – it’s not marketed that way), I can set up a queue of vids for the kids and let them play through it on the XBox 360 now.  You do have to use your “Instant Video Queue,” so the kids can’t use the XBox to watch stuff they shouldn’t – that’s a good thing.

Setting up the “New Experience” was really easy, too.  Sign into XBox Live, download updated in less than a minute, pick your new avatar (I didn’t obsess, though I could see that happening), and I went straight to the Netflix page on the new menuing system.  It was really pretty intuitive.

Netflix is a “game” (just an application, really, but it is XBox, after all) that downloads like any other game, very small, and when it runs for the first time it gives you instructions for going to Netflix and entering a code that appears on the screen to authorize your Netflix account to attach to you XBox and to your Live account.  By the time I got back downstairs from the web browser, I saw my list of “Instant Videos” on the XBox 360’s screen and that’s about all there was to it.

Now I’m back to work, Mom’s teaching the older kids, and the little ones are watching a movie about Jonah and a whale.  Sweet.