It's no secret that Netflix wants to offer online movie downloads — they've been talking about it for months and mention of a "Netflix Player" turned up the other day — which is why it's hardly surprising that the San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Netflix is finally getting very, very, very close to launching its on-demand rental service (can you feel it?). The service is described as being similar to MovieLink and CinemaNow, two not-particularly-loved online movie download services which have been kicking around for a little while now, but really got us going was mention that they're going to be offering a set top box, presumably with an internet connection for downloading movies and a hard drive for storing 'em (Akimbo, anyone?). It's no longer clear how TiVo is still mixed up with all this, but if they're not hooking up with TiVo anymore then Netflix has few options but to offer some other way for people to watch the movies they've downloaded on their TV rather than their computer, and a set top box more or less fits the bill (yeah, we're aware of the existence of media PCs and digital media adapter, but most people don't want to deal with any of that stuff).

[Via PVRBlog]