The site Seanbajuice is reporting that they were asked by Netflix to take a survey which seemed to indicate the company is considering partnering up with either Sony’s Playstation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (or both) to bring Netflix movie streaming to the living room. While this has been mentioned as a possibility by Netflix in the past, it seems almost too good to be true.

According to Seanbajuice the survey included wording indicating Netflix members would pay a one-time fee of $3 for which they would receive a disc that would activate the service on the game systems. Once that was complete they could stream any of the available 7,000 movies and TV shows included in their monthly rate.

True or not, we do know that Netflix does want to get into the living room badly. The box they are making with LG should be out later this year, but it does make some sense that if they could partner up with one of the game consoles so potential customers wouldn’t have to buy a new piece of hardware.

That said, would Xbox want to wipe out their own pretty decent download service? And to a lesser extent would the Playstation 3 want to lose potential Blu-ray movie sales to such a service (though Netflix did just go Blu-ray exclusive…)?

Netflix on one of those systems would almost for sure kill off Blockbuster, and it could very likely destroy the newly useful Apple TV as well. Think about it, which would you rather have, a $4 or 5 rental that lasts for 24 hours, or unlimited rentals of over 7,000 movies and TV shows that last as long as you’re paying your monthly subscription fee of $18? As long as you rent just 3 months a month, the choice is pretty obvious.

Another question is whether the movie studios would ever go for such a plan. While they may be okay with Netflix streaming unlimited movies to user’s PCs, that is still a fairly limited market. Streaming to a television via a game system is a different matter – how could they possibly recoup that money unless Netflix drastically raised rates or paid them a huge amount of money for the films’ rights – at which point Netflix would probably face financial hardships once again.

It’s a nice pipe dream, but I just don’t see unlimited streaming of Netflix movies coming to the game consoles. That would be the ultimate killer app for any console that landed such a deal – I know I would go out and buy one immediately, and sign up for Netflix in about 20 seconds. For now I’m leaning toward an Apple TV.

[via Engadget]

[UPDATE]: Gizmodo has a screenshot of the survey. Uh, who wouldn’t be interested in this?