Netflix is going to sell a gadget to let viewers watch movies immediately

Netflix is getting ready to market a gadget that will allow consumers to do with the Post Office what they did with Blockbuster: bypass it.

Beginning today, Netflix is going to offer its subscribers the opportunity to shell out $99 for a paperback-book-sized device that will attach to their TVs and let viewers watch movies and television programs immediately without any change in their subscription fees.

There is a catch, however. The number of available titles through the box is only about a tenth of the number available through the mail and most of the ones that are available are older titles. They are the same titles Netflix has offered subscribers via Internet feeds.

The box's chief rival, Apple TV, costs three times as much as the Netflix box, and charges $3.99 for each movie rental and $14.99 for the purchase of a film. Apple TV does, however, get access to movies the same day they are released on DVD. Amazon does something similar through TiVo boxes.

What makes the Netflix box different from the Apple and Amazon offerings and perhaps somewhat more problematic is that it doesn't contain a hard drive. It plays the movies directly from the Internet which involves consumers having an Ethernet cable or a wireless network in their homes. This means it is probably not a good investment for those with connection speeds of 1.5 megabits a second or slower because the picture could freeze on them.