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Thoughts on Netflix

Sunday, July 31, 2011

So a couple weeks ago, Netflix announced a change in pricing, whereby the DVDs-by-mail and  streaming services would be split into separate entities. Those (like us) who used the one-DVD-plus-streaming service would be required to pay $7.99 for one DVD at a time, and another $7.99 for unlimited streaming. Understandably, this has caused quite the online brouhaha.

The majority of the complaints seem to be centered around the perception that there’s nothing of quality in the streaming library. If you want to watch a recent movie, generally DVD is your best bet. I beg to differ. While admittedly most recently released DVDs are not available in the streaming library, it’s not like there’s nothing to watch there. In fact, this announcement was quite good for us, as we rarely watched the one DVD we had at any given time. We had our penultimate DVD for about three months before we sent it back unwatched. Our current DVD we’ve had for about three weeks now, also unwatched.

Streaming, then, is the service we truly use. In fact, at last count we had over two hundred movies in our instance queue. So it’s not like there’s nothing to watch. Besides, we were paying $9.99, so we’re saving money and not really losing all that much.

Even more entertaining, though, are those who express their, ahem, outrage. From time to time I’ve been reading Facebook comments that’ve basically devolved into a flame war. I particularly like how some, who can’t fathom that others may not have the same tastes, are okay with the new pricing. Therefore, these people are idiots. Right.

Yes, there are other choices out there: Red Box, Hulu, Amazon On Demand, etc. But for sheer convenience and value, Netflix, for now and in my opinion, can’t be beat.