Socket Jockeying

For those that have been playing around with the New Xbox Experience (NXE, or just “the new Xbox Live update”) that came out last Wednesday, you more than likely jetted over to the Netflix integration to see what it’s all about.  Arguably one of the most anticipated features of the NXE is the ability for Netflix subscribers to stream on-demand movies to their Xbox systems in HD with surround sound.

I was no exception, and when I got onto the internal beta for testing the NXE, the Netflix integration was one of the first things I tried.  It worked like a charm, but after playing with it a bit I did notice one odd thing.

First, the NXE allows you to see, on screen, a listing of all the movies in your Netflix “instant view queue”.  It does not allow you to add more movies, or adjust movie settings.  That’s all work left to do via the traditional webpage interface of Netflix.  The Xbox is more of a “read only” type UI.

That said, what you’re presented with is a listing of all the box tops of movies in your Netflix queue that can also be viewed online.  Netflix had offered this service (online viewing) for some time, but previously the only options for viewing were [1] on your PC or [2] on your TV using a Roku built set-top box. 

On the Netflix web UI, there are two queues.  One is your main movie request queue (the movies that are going to be mailed to you) and one is an instant view queue.  Typically, as you add movies to your queue for mailing, they will get automatically added to your instant view queue if they can be.  In addition, you can see all the instant viewable movies in your main queue as they have little “play” buttons next to their names.

Now that we have context, I can explain the bug I tripped upon.  I noticed that the movies listed in my Xbox were not all the movies that I expected to be able to instant view.  At first I assumed this might be a bug with the Xbox code, but after poking around in my Netflix account on the Netflix website, I found the same bug there.  My main queue had 15 movies in it that were available for instant playing (play buttons next to them), while my instant view queue had only 12.  It appeared that the NXE was using Netflix’s instant queue view as it’s primary listing of movies available to it, and that queue (which is maintained by Netflix, not Microsoft) was not correct.

Intrigued, I rung up Netflix support to see what to do about it.  The cheerful customer support rep thought about my problem for a bit and came back with “yeah, I think I’ve seen that before… mostly with really old queue entries, sometimes they just don’t seem to get automatically bumped over into the instant view queue”.

Indeed, the two items that weren’t showing up had been in my queue “forever” and that could very well have been their common thread.  Regardless, Netflix recommend I either [1] remove the movies from my queue and re-add them or [2] go to the details page for each missing movie, and choose the “add to instant queue” (it pops up when you mouse over the play button) directly. 

Both workaround methods worked for me, and once they were in the instant queue online, they immediately appeared on my Xbox.