• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 14, 2008

Netflix said today it's going to offer most subscribers the opportunity to stream as many videos as they want from its roster of 6,000 movies and television shows available for online viewing.

When Netflix first rolled out streaming rentals last year, the company limited the number of hours users could stream each month. Subscribers on the most popular plan, $16.99 a month for three hard copy DVDs at one time, were able to stream 17 hours of video a month.

The move is widely seen as a preemptive strike against Apple, which is expected to announce its own online video rental store this week at Macworld.

But whether Netflix will be able to compete against Apple here remains to be seen. As of this morning, it's still not clear what Apple's offering will look like, but some observers expect that Apple's service will be more convenient because it will allow users to view rentals on iPods as well as laptops and desktops.

Also, much will depend on whether Netflix can offer a better selection of titles than Apple. As of now, many of the most popular of the 90,000 videos in Netflix's library are available in DVD format only.

Netflix's service faces some challenges even without the competition from Apple. It requires a high-speed Web connection that will work reliably enough to stream two hours worth of video. Also, Mac users will be shut out of Netflix's service, because it only operates on PCs running Windows.

In the short term, whether online video rentals from either Netflix or Apple prove successful will depend on whether people are willing to watch long-form video on their computer monitors. While Apple sells a gadget that lets people watch online video on TV screens, and something similar is on the way from Netflix, for now most streaming video is viewed via computer. Until that fact changes, online video rentals might have a difficult time gaining widespread acceptance.