As those with an Xbox 360 know, yesterday was their bug summer update. Among other things, this added an improved Netflix streaming client to the service, which you’ll download the first time you start up Netflix after the update. Last night I tested out the new client, and it is a huge improvement over what was there before.

My wife and I watched a few episodes of The Office. The first one went by fine, but on the second one at one point in the episode the picture blinked and the progress bar for the episode popped on at the top of the screen briefly. It had adjusted the picture quality down just a notch because, according to Netflix, my Internet “slowed”. Then, a smile spread across my face. Before, when Netflix thought your connection slowed, it would completely stop what you were watching, revert to the loading screen, readjust the quality and load the stream again. Now, it just blinks briefly and hardly causes any interruption in your viewing. This, by far, is the best improvement. It should be noted also that now it will adjust your quality up if your connection improves, as well. Before, it would only adjust down. In the future I’d like to see options so we can set our own picture quality – if each episode didn’t start off in full-on HD mode, it may not have to adjust down at all.

In addition to that, I spent some time browsing through the different sections of movies and TV shows that you can now add to your streaming queue right from your Xbox. It was a more robust feature than I expected. I had read that it would just be new and popular titles, but I swear they had every streaming movie and TV show in Netflix’s library on those lists, which were broken up by genre. The only thing I’d like to see is either a search feature or an alphabetical listing by genre, to make it easier to find exactly what you want to watch. I added several things to my queue, which was as easy as hitting the “X” button on the controller.

What a vast improvement over the previous client – this is probably the most notable added feature in the update for me. It could still use some more features, like I mentioned above, but things are heading in the right direction.