Previously in order to view 720p HD streams from Netflix’s Watch Instantly service you had to use a set-top box like Roku or your PS3. Netflix has officially announced HD streaming for PC and Mac.

Announcement from Netflix:

This is Brent Ayrey, Director of Product Management at Netflix. I wanted to let you know that we now have a number of movies and TV episodes available to watch in HD on your PC or Mac. HD streaming requires Silverlight 3, and you must have both sufficient bandwidth and a sufficiently large screen size to get an HD stream. When watching a title that has HD stream available you’ll see an icon in the player controls at the bottom of the screen – if the title is streaming in HD that icon will light up.

You can browse the HD titles here: http://www.netflix.com/WiHD

[Enjoy] watching in HD on your PC or Mac!

Titles are very limited at the moment but word is that roughly half of all Netflix streams will be available in HD soon. Hover over a title and look for “streaming (HD available)” in the Format section like in the screenshot up top.

Despite the limited HD streaming titles, Netflix continues to improve and move in the right direction each week. Considering you can get DVD rentals AND streaming for less than $10 a month I would think this is a perfect time to sign up for Netflix.

Source: Netflix

Right now, the Crystal HD chip is only in mini PCIe cards but should make it’s way to PCIe x1 and ExpressCard some time in the future. This means lots of love for nettops, netbooks, AppleTV and Mac Mini (at the cost of $69) but none for the rest of us for a while. Broadcom Crystal HD support will be available in the next release of XBMC. Until then you can try out one of the nightly builds.

This changes the game for XBMC and other multimedia software because it has a common programming API, it’s cross-platform, and it’s open source. Hopefully we’ll see more 3rd party media players taking advantage of this soon.