An addendum to yesterday's post about Netflix adding the Starz catalog: The picture quality sucks. A lot of the films are pan-and-scan, which is bad enough, but the poor picture quality is far more serious of an issue. I'm hoping it's a bandwidth issue, that lots of users are trying out the new movies, putting a strain on the server and forcing it to stream lower-quality videos. So we'll see if picutre quality still sucks in a week. I will say that I've looked at a few sample movies, and there is some variation in quality, and newer releases seem to look slightly better than back-catalog films, from my very limited tests. But right now I'm watching The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and not only is it pan-and-scan, but the picture quality reminds me of watching streaming video through RealVideo about five years ago.

I'll give it a week or two and see if it improves, but if not, at least Netflix labels all the Starz movies, so I can avoid them in the future.