Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 5 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Announced in the current issue of the TiVo newsletter, Netflix integration will be available on the Series3 and THD boxes next month! If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you’ll be able to “instantly” stream movies from Netflix to your TiVo … for free.

I was a Netflix subscriber back in 1999 when I was still a traveling consultant. I would take the DVDs on the road with me to watch on my laptop and drop them in the mail as I finished each one. In those early days, you could go into your account on the Netflix web site and mark the movie as “I’ve mailed it back” and they would immediately ship the next one in your queue. That way when I got back home on Friday, a new set of DVDs would be waiting for me for my trip the next week. Once they switched to the “your next DVD doesn’t ship until we receive one back”-model, the service became less useful as there could be a week when I had no discs to take with me because they didn’t arrive by Saturday.

Once I switched jobs and stopped travelling, I just didn’t have the time to watch all of those movies, so I ended up cancelling my subscription and went back to the traditional Blockbuster rental method. Once Amazon Unbox (now called Amazon Video on Demand) appeared on TiVo, I started using that for the occasional movie rental. With Netflix coming to TiVo in December, though, I might have to consider re-subscribing.