Netflix was a pioneer in the business of movie rentals — getting consumers to rent DVDs online and mailing them out in cheery red envelopes. Recently, it has put a lot of effort into a service that delivers movies digitally over the Internet to subscribers, preparing for a day when getting movies on a physical disc will become outmoded.

People today use the Netflix service on their computers, but Netflix (NFLX) has cut a series of deals with hardware partners to make the service available on TV sets through an array of devices.

Most of these devices were designed to do other things: a videogame console, high-definition Blu-ray disc players, a TiVo (TIVO) digital video recorder. So to see how well the service works on these devices, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks comparing the Netflix experience on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360 game console, on LG Electronics’ BD300 Blu-ray disc player and on a set-top box from Roku called the Netflix Player. The last, as the name implies, is designed mainly for Netflix service.

The devices suffer from a relatively skimpy selection of videos on the Netflix Internet service. Netflix has more than 100,000 titles for rent on disc, but about 12,000 titles for viewing through its Internet service at the moment, and there’s often a months-long delay after a movie’s release before it shows up online. Television shows generally turn up more quickly, with a handful, like NBC’s “Heroes,” watchable the day after they air.

Still, I find the Netflix service very appealing, especially for catching up on episodes of TV series, such as “30 Rock,” that I missed when they aired. Unlike the iTunes Store and other sites that charge users $1.99 per TV episode and $3.99 to rent a movie online, the Netflix Internet service is free to subscribers to its DVD service on one of the company’s “unlimited” rental plans, which start at $8.99 a month.

Depending on how fast your Internet connection is, Netflix videos begin playing almost instantly, though you can’t keep permanent copies.

Connecting the devices to Netflix through my wired home network was easy in all three cases. I used a wireless home network — more common in homes than the wired variety — with the Roku device, the only one of three products that comes with built-in Wi-Fi (it worked well in this mode). People who want to use the Xbox 360 with a wireless network will have to spend $70 or so on an external Wi-Fi adapter. LG recommends people use only a wired home network to connect to Netflix from its player, including adapter kits that cost about $100 for transmitting data over home power lines.

All the devices require you to create a list of movies you want to watch from a computer, just like Netflix subscribers set up “queues” of DVDs to be delivered by mail. The Xbox 360 offered by far the most elegant-looking interface for browsing through videos in my Netflix queue, letting me glide through a long row of cover art representing the movies and TV shows I selected on my PC.

In contrast, the Netflix menu on the LG Blu-ray player and Roku device were more static, making it more awkward to navigate the expanse of titles. Netflix became available on the Xbox 360 in November as part of a more sweeping software upgrade, delivered over the Internet, that remade the graphical look of the system.

The quality of most of the videos on Netflix is, to my eyes, about DVD quality, though Netflix is adding some titles in high-definition to its Internet library. HD titles were available for viewing only through the Xbox 360 when I was testing the service. Roku and LG say they will make software updates available online this month that add HD support to their devices.

The Xbox 360 also has some annoying quirks when using it as a movie player — including a noisy fan I found distracting. The game controller that comes with the Xbox 360 is clunky for playing movies, so users will need to invest in an inexpensive additional remote-control design for media. The Roku and LG players, in contrast, were totally silent and had acceptable remote controls for watching Netflix videos.

I experienced the most serious glitches with the LG Blu-ray player, which occasionally dropped the video signal to my television set as I was watching a movie. LG says the loss of video signal could have been due to the connection I used to hook the player to my TV, though I’ve never had a problem with other devices using the same connection. The LG Blu-ray player also took the longest of all the devices to install software upgrades from the Internet.

While there are some differences in the Netflix experience on the Roku device, Xbox 360 and LG Blu-ray player, none of them is so great that they should trump other considerations — like a desire to play videogames or watch HD Blu-ray movies — in deciding which system is the best fit.

The LG Blu-ray player is available online for about $300. The cheapest Xbox 360 model is $199. (To get Netflix through the Xbox 360, users must be “gold” members to the $49.99-a-year Xbox Live game service.) But if what you’re after is primarily Netflix movies, and you’ve got room near your TV for another box, the $99.99 Roku product is the best value.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com

Just because the New York Post is now borrowing copy directly from The Wall Street Journal doesn't mean the tabloid can't pour water on its sister paper's reporting when it sees fit.

Yesterday, the Journal sent markets scurrying with this online bulletin:

Former AOL chief Jonathan Miller is talking to investors about raising money to purchase all or part of Yahoo Inc., a long-shot deal that signals that investors' interest in the troubled Internet property has yet to subside....Mr. Miller believes he can fashion a deal that would be worth about $20 to $22 a share to Yahoo shareholders, these people say, which would involve raising about $28 billion to $30 billion.

The full report appears in today's print edition of the Journal. Meanwhile, over in the Post, we get this:

Former AOL chief Jonathan Miller is indeed trying to raise money -- just not for an acquisition of Yahoo!, as a report yesterday implied. Rather, two sources close to Miller said he has been talking with private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds about raising capital for Velocity Interactive Group, the investment firm he runs along with former Fox Interactive Media boss Ross Levinsohn.

That leaves it to The New York Times to play mediator:

People in private equity circles said Mr. Miller had discussed possible options for Yahoo on and off since he left AOL two years ago.... But they also said that a private buyout of Yahoo was highly unlikely, given the daunting environment for deal-making and the amount of debt that such a large deal would require.

• Murdoch Papers Spar Over Yahoo Buyout
• First Bytes: RIM, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, Apple
• Miller-Time for Yahoo?

Adobe may be hard at work creating a version of its Flash Player that works on the iPhone, but until Apple gives its OK, iPhone users must muddle along without viewing most online video content.

Except that on Monday, Mobile ad network Greystripe announced it can now deploy Flash ads to the iPhone.

What's that you say?

Last we heard, Flash implementation on the iPhone wasn't going to happen any time soon. In fact, Apple's terms of service prohibits the use of Flash.

So how did Greystripe get around those hangups? Well, they're not really using Flash. They've just developed a home-spun tool that brings "all of the creative power of Flash" to the iPhone.

"We’re taking flash ads and turning them into a format that’s allowed to be shown on the iPhone," says Greystripe's CTO Andy Choi. That process essentially uses HTML and JavaScript to render images that look like video.

Greystripe has a demo you can play with. It's an iPhone emulator. Unlock the phone, click on the hockey game, then click through to view the ad. You'll see some really cool kaleidoscopic animation. Try touching it to manipulate the patterns. Everything is handled by plain old web standards -- HTML, CSS and JavaScript --  but it's a much richer interface than your average web page.

It's also decided downgrade from actual Flash video. But advertisers don't need to know that, and until Flash actually gets the greenlight from Apple, drops of video-like content such as this will trickle into the space one way or another.

Developers holding their breath for Flash to come to the iPhone will probably keel over before the Flash icon makes it to the iPhone's screen, but those creating workarounds while Apple ponders the pros and cons of Flash capabilities may be on to something.

Apple is loathe to cede control of its development platform — especially with something like Flash, which is essentially a development platform itself. While most of the video online is encoded in Flash, it is more than simply a video player. Capable of running applications on its own, Flash on the iPhone could enable developers rejected by the App Store to code their applications in Flash and upload them to a website where iPhone users could find them. That could divert users from the App Store and take away from profit at iTunes.

There are also compatibility problems. Flash is clunky and a memory suck for mobile devices, which aren't fast enough to handle most Flash-enabled sites. Steve Jobs has said Flash “performs too slow to be useful" for the iPhone and has similarly disparaging thoughts about Flash Lite, the mobile version which still outpaces the capabilities of most phone and isn't widely used.

Adobe has said that they are working on new versions of Flash for the iPhone, but the ultimate decision on implementing Flash depends on Apple. Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems Paul Betlem said in a September Town Hall meeting: "Apple calls the shots as to when it'll be available."

In the meantime, iPhone users are scrambling for video content and developers need a way to bring it to them.

GreyStripe's effort is a stopgap measure, but it can help advertisers used to working in Flash online.

"From the advertiser’s point of view, nothing has changed," says Choi. "They know that if you want to develop a rich media advertisement on the web, you do it in Flash. We've just created a tool that automatically translates any flash ad into java script plus html."

Can other developers utilize this work around? Yes. But it's not advanced enough to translate high end video and games.

The small size of ad files makes them easy candidates for java translation. Most video ads are under 100k, but games and applications running at 10MB would be too complicated to switch over.

But if advertisers can easily send video to the iPhone and viewers can view it without Flash, there will be more video fixes like this coming soon. While Apple is busy blocking Flash from the iPhone platform, small steps like GreyStripe's could eventually bring another video platform to mobile devices.

Even if that doesn't happen, as Choi says:

"You’ll see more things like this before you see full blown flash on the iPhone."

I'm in London, watching snowflakes fall amidst early morning rain flurries, reading David Grann's new book The Lost City of Z, and getting ready for the Barbican event tomorrow night.

But there's an article in the Guardian today about the WaterMill, which "uses the electricity of about three light bulbs to condense moisture from the air and purify it into clean drinking water." The company, Element Four, imagines a future for their product involving everything from irrigation and personal thirst to peacekeeping and disaster relief. Perhaps it might even require an update to the atlas of hidden water – where the water supply is "hidden" in the sky itself.

[Image: A diagram of the WaterMill at work].

As the company describes it:

The system draws in moist, outside air through an air filter. The moist air passes over a cooling element, condensing the moist air into water droplets. This water is then collected, passed through a specialized carbon filter and is then exposed to an ultraviolet sterilizer, eliminating bacteria.

Further:

The WaterMill is installed unobtrusively on the outside of your home, using outside air, so it won't dry out the air you breathe in your home. And don't worry if your outdoor air is less than pristine – even if you live in a crowded city, the Watermill's filtration system ensures your drinking water will be clean and free of toxins and bacteria – more pure than tap water or even spring water.

You're basically drinking water from a dehumidifier, then.

According to the Guardian, the obvious – if extremely uninteresting – next question is: "are you crazy?" But it would seem that the next question might actually be one of large-scale climate-engineering and the future of urban design.

In other words, would it be possible to re-engineer a city's weather patterns through the judicious and geographically strategic deployment of WaterMills? What might happen if this were to occur accidentally, over time, and according to no particular plan?

Over the years, say, tens of thousands – even millions – of these machines are installed in a humid city like New York, Tokyo, or London, achieving imperceptibly slow local climate modification. The city goes into a drought, with very little rainfall as humidity disappears – and it's all because of a certain line of products that have been installed, gradually, home by home, over the course of a decade.

Sucking hundreds of thousands of liters of water out of the air everyday, and re-directing that water into the sewage system through the metabolic processes of human bodies, these machines inadvertently re-engineer the local climate.

I remember walking to a restaurant through almost unbelievable summer humidity after a night at Postopolis!, thinking that massive, solar-powered air-conditioning units installed atop Manhattan skyscrapers could flood the surrounding streets with downward winds of cooled air to avoid uncomfortable nights – but industrial-sized WaterMills might accomplish the same thing, sitting up there in the heights of the marvelous, stealing water from the sky. Anti-clouds. Black engines atop roofs prevent rainfall. Whole summer storms could be stopped before they form. City-wide, temperatures drop and the humidity falters.

The resulting fresh water is then sold to Spain.

So if designer climates are the future of urban design, something explored in the forthcoming BLDGBLOG Book, then perhaps the widespread use of WaterMill technology might be an interesting way to start. Convince enough people in one large building, say, or even one borough, to install a home WaterMill... and see if the local climate begins to change.

This piece originally appeared on Geoff Manaugh's website, BLDGBLOG.