Netflix recently opened up a Mac Beta version of their Watch Instantly movie streaming service (via Microsoft’s much-maligned Silverlight. About 15 minutes ago I decided to give it a test drive, and now I’m already five minutes deep into Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century. It’s that simple!!! Just go to Netflix.com/silverlightoptin, click a button to enter the Beta, pick a movie to watch, install Silverlight, and your movie really will start playing instantly. It’s not false advertising!

My only complaint thus far is that, unlike a YouTube or Hulu clip, you can’t wait for the full video to load before you start watching — the video buffers itself in real time based on the strength of your internet connection. So every time my Gchat goes off, Twentieth Century goes off, too. This is surely my fault for attempting to multitask. I trust you would give Carole Lombard the undivided attention she deserves.

Apple has reportedly struck a deal with several major studios to release downloads of their films on the same date the titles are released on DVD, and I can’t tell whether or not Jeff Wells is being facetious when he says that this plan will “obviously…really hurt DVD retail, which will in turn diminish the sense of community we all get from going to DVD stores and poking around the aisles and talking with the checkout guys.”

This is not a facetious question, I actually want to know: Is that an experience that anyone has had recently? Assuming you don’t live in New York and frequent Kim’s? It’s been my understanding that for awhile now, most people get DVDs from a) Netflix; B) a chain store like Best Buy, Virgin or Borders; or C) any number of online retail sites. So the idea that this could damage an existing sense of DVD store community seems wrongheaded, because that hasn’t that “community” already long ceased to exist?

As for the idea that this will hurt DVD sales considerably, the Apple downloads will carry Apple DRM, meaning they’ll only be playable on iPods, Mac computers, and AppleTVs. There are an awful lot of home theater junkies who will refuse to watch movies on computer screens, and I’m just not convinced that most of those guys own AppleTVs. I am the only person I know who owns an AppleTV.

So Wells had to be joking, right? To quote Chris Matthews, as Wells himself has been known to do: “Ha!”

Remember last week, when that guy at CES asked the guy from Netflix why their Watch Instantly streaming service doesn’t work on a Mac, and the Netflix guy was all, “It’s totally Apple’s fault,” and I bought it, and a million Apple fanboys wrote in to tell me that I was wrong? Those were heady times. But now it looks like there’s a new kink in the works, which puts Netflix and Apple’s reticence to get together in a new light.

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If you, like me, are both a Mac user and a Netflix user, then the fact that the latter’s Watch Instantly movie streaming service is incompatible with the former’s devices is probably one of the banes of your existence (unless you have a life beyond movies, and your computer, and watching movies on your computer. Must be nice.) I’ve always just assumed that Netflix was responsible for the so-1999 decision to ignore the growing market of Mac users and keep the platform PC-only.

I was, apparently, wrong.

Hacking Netflix has linked to a CES interview with Netflix’s Steve Swasey, in which he responds to the “why can’t a playa watch a movie on a Mac, y’all?” question rather defensively:
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