How do I watch a movie on the Netflix site?

When movie rental powerhouse Netflix first came out with its "on demand" streaming movie service, it was indeed just for Windows users and us Mac users were left out in the cold, but that's no longer true. Your friends are wrong!

In fact, what you need to do is install a streaming video plug-in called Silverlight from everyone's favorite huge computer company in Seattle, Microsoft.

But wait, don't click on that link. It's even easier than that...

Here, let me show you how I was able to watch the entertaining action/adventure film National Treasure: Book of Secrets on my little Apple MacBook Air. First step, of course, is to log in to your Netflix account, then look for "Watch Instantly" on the top left of the page:

Once your there, there are quite a few different films you can opt to watch: As of this writing, Netflix has over 12,000 films you can watch instantly (well, instantly once you install Silverlight).

Let's pick one. Say.... National Treasure:

Even though we know we don't have what we need, click on "Play" immediately below the movie information graphic.

No surprise, Netflix tells you that you need to install Silverlight:

Click on the big "Install Now" button (I mean, really, it's not hard to find, is it?) and you'll be prompted to download a disk image file:

Once you've finished the download you'll see a "pkg" file show up in the Finder:

Double click on it and you're now in the Silverlight Installer:

Click "yes", "continue", "next", etc etc until it's all installed: the default locations and configuration are just fine for what we need. Won't take more than a minute or two, and then, suddenly, the Web page that had the "Install Now" starts to be functional.

And, it starts by testing your video download speed and quality:

Once that's done and it does a bit of configuration, you'll find that the movie just starts right up and it's nice and big, in good resolution too:

That's how you can jump right into streaming videos through Netflix. If you're on a PC the experience is quite similar, but you might well find that you already have Silverlight installed on your Windows computer, which definitely makes it even easier.