Ahh, Netflix is doing online videos. But, this isn’t the Verisign thing I saw last week at CES. It’s streaming only. It’s Windows only. I don’t believe that it’s HD.

Why is HD so important? Because HD customers are willing to spend much more on content than people who have 10-year-old TV sets and because there’s a scarcity of content.

Forget HD for a second: this also bums me out for other reasons. The time I’d use online movies is a few hours before I go on a long trip — I’d like to load up my laptop with four movies to watch, say, on my trip to Switzerland’s LIFT conference next month. But streaming doesn’t let you store movies locally. Sounds like the DRM police are in full force on decisions here (why else choose Microsoft’s streaming solution?) Even worse, if I’m in Switzerland for 10 days, maybe Maryam and I want to watch a movie — usually Swiss movies are in French or German and there isn’t very much choice on hotel TV systems. The problem with streaming is that it usually sucks in hotels. That’s why so many people came to our BlogHaus last week cause we had a 20mbit connection. I used streaming stuff at Microsoft and invariably the stream would stop and start when viewing from hotels. Not going to be a good experience.

Hollywood: you need to find a better solution.

Oh, and Dave Winer, thanks for pointing out that I’m wrong. 🙂

More on this on TechMeme.

UPDATE: one note to Dave Winer. Interesting that he used “momentum” as a debating device to prove he’s right. Hey, Dave, I remember in 1977 mainframes had a lot of “momentum” too. I guess what he’s saying is that Microsoft Office isn’t dead either. Heheh.