So, love internet video, right? Who doesn’t? Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix, amongst others, have gained much ground in recent years and have caused companies to reconsider the way they distribute TV shows and movies. The catch? These are all stuck on your computer and on what is most likely a significantly smaller screen than you have on your home theater. Sure, you can hook up your computer to your TV. However, I find this setup really inconveinent and truly impractical for my purpose.  I am not going to tether my laptop to my TV and squint at my desktop to watch a movie. Sure, you can buy various gadgets to hook to your TV that can retreive your media content. However, if you are a reader of this site chances are you already have the hardware you need to do this!

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are media altars, if you know what you are doing. You don’t even need to go out buy any sort of discs to make these the spotlight of your entertainment center. Both systems can grab videos off your computer and play them on your big screen, both supporting a wide range of formats. Awesome. Both systems have a video rental store. Sweet. The Xbox 360 can stream Netflix movies and TV shows, and the PS3 can play Blu-Rays. So, yeah, both systems are quite capable. But I still found myself spending alot of time watching TV shows on my computer instead of my big screen.

That’s where PlayOn comes in. PlayOn is a simple little media server that runs on your Windows (more on that later) computer and actually allows your PS3 or 360 to play internet videos from YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, CBS, ESPN, and more. It works very much the way you would stream videos off your computer. The software “tricks” the system into thinking those videos are local on your PC. What is actually happening is your computer is rapidly streaming, saving, and encoding the video in a format the systems can understand. If you have a decent computer, it should be pretty seamless.

Doesn’t the Xbox 360 already do Netflix? Yes, it does, however, the “official” Netflix client, while very sleek and usable, requires an Xbox Live Gold subscription in addition to your Netflix subscription. For alot of us that isnt a big deal since we already had Gold accounts, but, for those of you who don’t and don’t want to pay and extra $50 a year ontop of your Netflix subscription, this is a good alternative.

So I can use Netflix on PS3 just like the 360? Yes and no. You don’t get the fancy client that the Xbox 360 has, but, you are able to stream any show or movie from your instant queue on the PS3, you just have to scroll through it on the XMB the same way you do media that is shared on the network. However, HD is not supported through PlayOn, and the official 360 Netflix client seems to be slightly better quality since it is a direct connection and not having to stream off your local computer. However, the quality is still very watchable, and its better than no Netflix support at all.

Does this work on a Mac? Unfortunately there is not a Mac version of the PlayOn Client, however some people have reported success using the Windows Virtualization products such as Fusion and Paralells. However, I have found that while slightly inconveinent, using Boot Camp to setup a Windows XP or Vista partition provides the best performance. Thats the way I ran it on my MacBook before we upgraded the family computer to a new Vista machine that was actually technically proficient enough to run the software smoothly.

What about the Wii? MediaMall has made a vague promise to add Wii support sometime in 2009. No more details have been revealed.

What do I need to know? First of all check out the official site and make sure your system is beefy enough to handle the streaming. Our machine is nothing special and it does the job just fine. You can use PlayOn free for 14 days, and it is a $29.99 one-time licensing fee after that. Be aware that occasionally the content providers such as Hulu and Netflix sometimes change the way they do their feeds and sometimes this temporarily “breaks” the way this program works, but MediaMall is usually pretty quick to fix these problems and they even have a user support form just for such things.

Do I have to keep going back to my computer to make it work? You have to setup your Netflix queue ahead of time, but other than that, you can browse videos right on your console without having to go to your PC to “Select” a video. You can browse the entire Hulu catalog, for example, by genre, alphabetically, and by category. It takes a little getting used to, but it is certainly usable. You may occassionally have the update your client, and whilst you can view many YouTube videos that are in the various “top” lists, if you wish to watch a specific one you can just add it to your favorites in Youtube on your computer, and then it will show in your favorites on your console.

So, that’s about the end of my pitch. I seriously have spent hours watching TV shows and movies on my Xbox and I keep finding new things to watch through Hulu and Netflix. The license is $30 after the 14 day trial ends and I felt it was worth it.

Check it out!

Public Service Announcement: Before you ask, no, I am not affiliated in any way with the people who make this product. Also, some of you may already know about this product, so good for you. This product has existed for some time (found out about it from Tycho at Penny-Arcade some time ago). However, the software has just recently gotten stable enough for me to give it a whole-hearted recommendation. I feel this is a product many of our readers would be interested in and I have nothing to gain by endorsing it.