I guess if we’re sticking with the marriage analogy, I am playing the roll of voyeur. Last week Netflix and Sony announced that Netflix subscribers could now watch movies and TV shows from the ginormous Netflix "watch instantly" catalogue on their PS3s. Disc-free Netflix enjoyment in the wired living room isn’t exactly the newest of concepts — TiVo, Xbox, Roku, and countless other boxes have been boasting the functionality forever now, so what makes this announcement any different? Unfortunately, it’s not a good thing.

Unlike the other services, which all have the Netflix streaming functionality built natively into their respective operating systems, the PS3 requires a disc — you heard it, a disc — in order to be able to stream media from Netflix. In the politically incorrect words of Alan from The Hangover, whoever made that decision is a re-tard. So you’re telling me that — through 2010 — every time I want to watch Netflix on my PS3 I have to get up off the couch, remove whatever game is already in my PS3, put it in its case (because game care is important), insert the Netflix disc into the PS3, then walk all the way back to the couch? And I don’t even want to imagine what it will be like once I decide the movie I’m watching blows and I’d rather be playing a video game. Before you know it my Saturday afternoon activity has gone from lazing to exercising.

The good news is that, once the stupid disc is inserted and the Netflix interface is fired up, it works really well. You’re not limited to the movies and TV shows that are on your “Watch Instantly” queue like a lot of the other boxes — Roku in particular — and there’s a ton of HD content that streamed really well, looked great and didn’t hiccup at all, at least in my tests.

So overall, fellas, seriously, lose the disc and build that shit into the PS3 as a native application — you’re doing that anyway with Facebook later this week, right? Why not make it a threesome? If not, I hope you’re ready for a potential Netflix/PS3 divorce due to lack of demand, and perhaps even a sordid affair involving Facebook. Voyeurs: prepare.