Being a network-geek, and having been really bored one weekend, I took my macbook pro, and my girlfriend's macbook air (both of which have this problem) to a cage at equinix that I'd built out for a customer a few years ago. That network is equipped with a pair of cisco 6509's with sup2-msfc2s (old gear, but perfectly adequate for the task at hand). Each router has 3x 1gb uplinks to different providers (internap, time warner, and level3) running BGP. All of three ISP's peer directly with Netflix's AS. The problems persisted whether I was behind my routing, or statically routing by grabbing an IP on the /29 stub network each provider gives me to establish the bgp connection).
I tested both from behind my routing, and for fun, from my testing subnets (the stub networks) which statically route through their respective uplinks. Plenty of bandwidth, no mid-level ISP to insert QoS wankery. Same problems.
As for owning the movie, did that even come up in my previous comment? If so, then forgive me, it's not something I care about. In the rare instance (3-4x per month) where I want to watch a movie, I just want it to work. I don't want it to pause every few minutes to see a "buffering" screen. That's three steps backwards.
The commonality between both laptops is that they run os x( one on snow leopard, one on lion). I suspect silverlight is the real culprit, but I don't care. The solution would be to allow customers to buffer large chunks of the movie (20-30%) or download the whole movie before playing. Instead Netflix (probably due to being hamstrung by their agreements with content providers) tries to be too clever with variable bit-rate encoding and ruins the viewing experience. (even one pause is unacceptable in my book, let alone the 5-10 I often had per movie).
Whenever I discuss this with others, some people have similar quality problems, some people claim it works perfectly making me wonder if it's platform specific. Out of curiosity, are you running Mac, Windows, or Linux?
Also, the silverlight client has ridiculously bad volume control, I never quite understood why that is.