The Netflix business model is starting to show its age — and Xbox stands to benefit.

This week, online DVD rental service Netflix announced that about 1 million of its customers are streaming content through Xbox Live, the digital media delivery service provided by Microsoft to Xbox 360 owners.

The 12-year-old Netflix has built a solid reputation by loaning DVDs to its customers, sending out another disc for each one returned, but a couple years ago introduced Watch Instantly, a feature allowing subscribers to stream movies and TV programs straight through their Internet connections to their computers.

Three months ago, Netflix extended the service to Xbox Live Gold members who already had a Netflix account, enabling those subscribers to view an inventory of about 12,000 titles through their Xbox 360 gaming consoles instead. The partnership coincided with a “soft launch” of Netflix’s streaming of high-definition content, which was not made available to PC users right away.

Since the partnership began, nearly 2 billion minutes of content has been viewed on Xbox, by Netflix’s estimates.

And since then, Game Guy hasn’t been renting many Netflix movies by mail.

That, I think, was the idea though. Using a high-speed Internet connection, it has been easy to call up Netflix, click on the Watch Instantly tab, browse the the latest titles or type up a request in the search field and start watching seconds later. The list of titles is somewhat limited — it consists mostly of older films and TV series — but Game Guy hasn’t had time to keep up with the latest stuff anyway. He can watch what he wants when he wants and not worry whether he accidentally threw out one of Nexflix’s disc-return envelopes.

But here’s the important part, as far as Microsoft is concerned: I’m getting more use out of my Xbox 360 by playing videos when not playing video games. I’d guess, in fact, that I’m using Xbox about a third more often than before Netflix streaming came to Xbox Live.

This is a big deal in my household, especially considering my suspicion of Xbox due to its history of poor reliability. I still pray the console will make it through a full game review, but now I’m hoping also that it lasts through the upcoming season of Showtime’s “Dexter” and another spin through one of my all-time favorite films, “The Hunt for Red October.”

So far, so good — for Microsoft.