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[Lorri Dent]

Hastings talked about Netflix's "niche" philosophy -- a Goldilocks-esque business plan of staying "not too big, not too small" -- in a panel discussion Tuesday at the Wired Business Conference in New York City.

"We've consistently said getting into current season [TV] or newer movies would not be profitable for us," Hastings said. "It would be an Armageddon. It would be World War III, and we likely wouldn't survive that battle."

Hastings acknowledged that his company doesn't expect to compete on sports and breaking news, which are suited to live broadcast. "[Netflix is] not every single thing all of you folks want to watch, but it's $8 a month," he said. "It's choosier content."

Still, it's clear that one of Netflix's top priorities is upgrading the quality and depth of the content it has available for instant streaming. On top of licensing its first original series -- "House of Cards," starring Kevin Spacey and due out in late 2012 -- Netflix has recently snapped up some choice reruns, including "Mad Men" and the first season of "Glee."

That's a costly and time-consuming process, but it's been in the game plan all along. Netflix (NFLX) attracted most of its giant subscriber base -- which now tops 22 million in the U.S. -- through its DVDs-by-mail rental service. But streaming has been the real goal ever since the company's inception in 1997, according to Hastings.

"We had set up the whole business essentially for streaming, but the network wasn't big enough years ago," he said. "But in 2005 we clicked on YouTube and watched cats on skateboards -- and we thought, it's here! Since then, we've had so much fun finally delivering on our name: Net. Flix."

For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video.

Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight).

Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system.

It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning.

I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in.

I find your blog entry interesting, because IMO the Silverlight netflix browser plugin is unusable in full-screen mode due to screen tearing issues under both Vista and Mac OS X. This was never a problem with their previous version that I believe was flash-based.

Flash also has built in H.264, so that shouldn't matter too much. I'm curious if this is a Win7 thing, or just a Microsoft thing, because it's the exact opposite situation on OS X. Flash video runs great, Silverlight video makes me want to shoot myself in the face.

Hulu desktop isn't exactly what it should have been, I believe they're love hate relationship stems from Hulu wanting to make it an open platform but being tied down by NBC and other major broadcasters who want more draconian type restrictions.

I tried Hulu Desktop too on my Mac Mini connected to my TV. I did not care for the black UI and small thumb nails, I much prefer using a hand held mouse (gyration) and enjoying Hulu through a browser.

I had numerous issues with the Hulu Desktop. While Flash may look good because of the H.264 support, it is a horrible technology. Flash cannot make use of multiple cores (I hear that is changing in future releases... I hope it's true), and it's CPU utilization is through the roof. The instant I start watching Hulu shows (through the browser or the new Hulu Desktop), the temp goes through the roof and my fans start running like crazy. When watching Netflix movies, CPU utilization and heat are not an issue. I wish people would give Silverlight more of a chance and not hate it simply because it's a Microsoft Product, in 2 releases they are where Flash was in 5 or 6.

Another note, I am currently using XBMC on my computers, and it was nice when Hulu was working with it. It drives me nuts that they want you to use an entirely different program (that doesn't work very well) just to watch their content. I had no problem with them playing their ads when watching in XBMC, that's fine, but since they removed support for XBMC, I just use the NBC-Universal plugin to watch TV programs and they don't have commercials.

I found that removing the check from the box labeled "Enable hardware acceleration" under SETTINGS in Flash inproved performance quite a bit, both in the Hulu desktop app and through the Hulu website.

When I started Netflix's Australian import Instant Hotel -- after the streaming service numbed me into submission by auto-playing the trailer for it every night when I went to pull up Schitt's Creek -- I really had no idea what to expect. I have tried a lot of home and real estate shows on Netflix and let me tell you, not all of them are winners. But it didn't take long for me to realize that not only is Instant Hotel one of the best in the genre the service has to offer, it's also one of the messiest, pettiest unscripted series I have ever had the pleasure of watching.

The premise of the show is fairly simple: Five teams of two take turns spending the night in one another's "instant hotels," aka their short-term vacation rentals (the first season is split up into two rounds, each with a groups of five pairs). Each of the four guest couples give the instant hotel a rating out of 10 based on the house, location/local attractions, the quality of their night's sleep and value for money. In turn, whichever team is hosting the couples that week then gets to score them on how they did as guests (were they clean, did they check out on time, etc.). There's also a hospitality expert, Juliet Ashworth, who scores each instant hotel as well and basically acts as the voice of reason of the series. At the end of each round, all these scores are tallied together and the winner moves on to the grand finale where they will face off against the winner of the other round for the chance to score an all-expenses paid trip to California to stay in Leonardo DiCaprio 's instant hotel. (And no, I'm not making this last part up.)

The premise is definitely unique, but that's not what makes Instant Hotel so great. It's the casting. The clashes between these huge personalities and massive egos are far and away what takes this show from a fun distraction to an addicting binge. As Group 1's Leroy would say, "less is a bore," and these contestants really live up to that motto.

When you start Instant Hotel, you're introduced to the first group of contestants who do their best in the beginning to maintain a faade of civility. But it doesn't take long before a rivalry between mother-daughter duo Babe and Bondi -- who make their grand entrance on the show by driving their car into a ditch -- and Brent and Leroy -- who are literally (and accurately) labeled as the "fussy couple" in their chyron -- derails the tenuous sportsmanship and leads to a feud greater than Kanye and Taylor, Bette and Joan or Azealia Banks and pretty much anyone.

Throughout the first group's five-episode journey together, the pettiness grows until it begins to be reflected in the team's scores for one another -- and their reviews. While the individual rating each couple gives the instant hotels are kept secret, brief reviews written by the contestants about their stays are read aloud at the end of each episode. Most couples try to keep the hosting pair's feelings in mind, but as the season goes on, some of the guests -- namely Babe, Bondi, Brent and Leroy -- start getting crueler and crueler, culminating in cutting digs like calling one instant hotel a "mausoleum of the mundane" and saying another's decor "looks like lipstick on a gorilla." And this is only scratching the surface of the casual savageries being tossed around.

Watching this low-stakes, high drama train wreck with glee, I couldn't wait to see the slow dissolution of politeness occur again in the second group of contestants. However, it didn't take long before I realized there would be no pretension of civility in the second half of the season. Group 2 wastes no time before devolving into some truly petty drama that could give several Bravolebrities inferiority complexes.

This is thanks in large part to Serena, who -- as she loves to mention -- is in the top one percent of reviewers on TripAdvisor, whatever that means. In the seventh episode, when the guests are staying at Tristan and Bec's houseboat, Serena seemingly lies about there being no hot water available to shower (which, as is later explained to her, is impossible) and calls the owners to express this complaint in addition to claiming that some lights were flickering. When the exhausted hosts show up to help, Serena says this is only a few of the many issues everyone has been having and tells the other guests to "share your angst"; they don't, but only because there is absolutely nothing wrong with the houseboat or their stay.

When Serena later visits Mikey and Shay's house, she snoops through drawers and finds receipts showing that some of the art in the house, including a Dali, aren't original paintings but limited-edition prints, as though knowing that the owners only had thousands of dollars' worth of art in their house rather than millions was somehow an unforgivable sin. For context: When the guests stayed at Serena and Sturt's instant hotel, the main activity she recommended involved a three-hour tour of a sewage treatment plant. So... glass houses, stones, etc.

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