I can’t express how excit­ed I am about the news that Net­flix’s “Watch Now” con­tent will be avail­able via Xbox Live. This is a tremen­dous step toward treat­ing Xbox 360 as a mul­ti­me­dia plat­form, a play Sony made with the PS3 and failed. Microsoft made a deci­sive move to broad­en the appeal of the Xbox 360 beyond gamers and Net­flix found a way to wean them­selves off of the DVDs by mail ser­vice that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the video rental indus­try. It’s an amaz­ing win for both companies.

As I look over my decid­ed­ly nerdy queue (I have La Guerre Est Finie), I see that most of the titles that inter­est me will be avail­able when the Net­flix con­tent goes live on Xbox Live. If any­thing, I may actu­al­ly save mon­ey by par­ing back my Net­flix sub­scrip­tion and rely more on their unlim­it­ed video on-demand library. Net­flix will undoubt­ed­ly work with Microsoft to influ­ence the avail­abil­i­ty of new titles as the release win­dows shrink between the­atri­cal and DVD release date. In short, it’s going to be a great fall and winter.