Netflix Online on the Mac: View on Demand Streaming with VMware Fusion

I’ve recently been introduced to the wonder that is Netflix, and have been having a great time playing around with my queue, and so forth thinking about what movie I want to watch next, and so on.

But the other day, I went to check out Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” product, which lets Netflix customers watch videos on demand, right from their computer.

I was browsing around in Firefox 3 on my Mac at the time, and as such, ran into the oft talked about issue that Netflix online doesn’t support  Mac browsers. 

Luckily, I happen to know a thing or two about running Windows on the Mac with VMware Fusion, so I just popped into my Windows XP demo VM, and proceeded to go through the installation process to see what all our users out there in VMware Fusion land would have to do in order to watch Netflix on their Mac. 

Turns out, in about five minutes, after doing some updates to Windows Media Player, and rebooting my VM, I was on my way.

And I just happened to be running screen capturing software the whole time, so I could cut it into the demo you see here.

So, it appears Netflix can run on a Mac, after all, and without rebooting even! Enjoy!