According to an interview the company's CEO, Jim Keyes, gave last week to E-Commerce Times, the company is planning to introduce a feature that sports "the same capability put into a Blu-ray player," and bring it to the market early in 2009.
Blockbuster last month announced the availability of its first-ever streaming box, the 2Wire MediaPoint digital media player
On our sister site, E-Gear.com, blogger Greg Robinson asks if the warring between different devices carrying movies from Netflix and Blockbuster could amount to a second high-def format war.
Download set top boxes and download portable players ( ie Blockbuster, Apple TV, VUDU, Hulu, PS3 ) are a thing of the past, only to be replaced by the technology used by service providers such as MyTVPAL ( www.mytvpal.com ) and Netflix ( www.netflix.com ).
Service providers like MyTVPAL offer 1080p instant blu-ray streaming video on demand and live tv over PC Player, set top box, and I think they will have a portable device out soon.
Keep in mind also that P2P is on the way out because it uses to much bandwidth, both up and down, and is unstable. I'm refering to service providers such as VUDU ( a one trick pony ) and Joost, who latest foray into portable video on demand on the itouch / iphone is frezing, buffering, and providing a horrible user experience even on my 6mbps connection.
Streaming video is a great addition for live tv an video on demand, but at the end of the day only those technology companies like Matrixstream ( www.matrixstream.com ) will be able to support the best quality over the best effort public internet when doing a triple play ( set top box, PC Player, and portable device ) because currently where Netflix requires 8mbps for 720p streaming, MyTVPAL can support 720p streaming a 3mbps and 1080p blu-ray streaming at 6mbps.
Keep the above in mind when considering the average person today in the United States and Canada has between 1.5 - 3.0Mbps. So While MyTVPAL can service the majority of broadband users today in the United States and Canada in both 720p and 1080p today it will be years before Netflix can service a fraction of the broadband population in high definition instant video streaming.
At the end of the Day service providers such as Netflix and Blockbuster will have evolve to provide a service like MyTVPAL or suffer the consequences of not providing low bandwidth, instant playing, 1080p blu-ray high defin