Gamertell

The simple act of renting movies used to involve trips to the local video store, along with time being spent scouring the stores’ shelves of offerings in order to select the movie of one’s liking. Sadly, this scenario is not the case anymore, as brick-and-mortar video stores are slowly but surely finding their economic days being numbered.

However, the opposite is true of the through-the-mail-video-rental company, Netflix. Since its inception, many people have deemed it more convenient (and cheaper) means to receiving movies. This positive reception has been maintained since its inclusion into the New Xbox Experience in Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Michael Pachter, an analyst for Webush Morgan, thinks that Microsoft’s decision to incorporate Netflix into their 360s will do nothing but yield positive results in the future.

Kotaku reports Pachter as saying that “subscriber growth will continue at super-normal levels for quite some time” as a result of the Netflix partnership and its integration with Xbox Live’s feature set.

Further predicting the fortunes of the Xbox 360, Pachter mentioned that he believed that “around 5-6 million Xbox 360s will be sold in the U.S. this year.” That is a strong figure, it almost makes one wonder if he is as confident regarding the prospects of the Playstation 3, which has not been faring as well in console sales for quite some time. Remember that Sony is not embracing Netflix, claiming people can already stream Netflix rentals via their PCs and that gamers supposedly want to own the stuff they download.

Netflix’s fortunes were positive as well. The company announced that it ended the fourth quarter of 2008 with a 28 percent subscriber growth over the year before. News like this makes it an excellent time to invest in Netflix (and maybe in Microsoft as well).

Read [Kotaku] via [GameDaily]