Netflix, you sucked me in
I know I’m a latecomer to the party, but I just subscribed to Netflix. yesterday. I’ve been debating subscribing for a while now and I couldn’t resist trying it out anymore. It seems like I’ve constantly got this long list of movies I want to see, and it always gets longer, never shorter. I wouldn’t call myself a “film buff” exactly, but I do like seeing movies. My laptop even has a running text file I use called “movies to see.txt” that grows ever longer by the day.
Anyways, I signed up for the lowest possible plan they’ve got, which is $5 per month: 1 DVD at a time, 2 per month. Seems like a good enough starting point for me. Lately we’ve probably been watching 1 per month, maybe less. I see more movies in the theater than at home. But ever since we got the 47″ HDTV, it’s been pretty underutilized. I play a fair number of games on it in HD, and watch the paltry few HD channels we get, but we never watch movies on it. I think we downloaded one HD flick off of Xbox Live Marketplace (BEERFEST!) since we’ve had the TV. I’m sure there are some jealous damn people out there right now.
For Colette and I, watching movies at home has always been something of a chore. You have to think of what you want to see, remember to get it somehow, then actually have it laying around somewhere accessible when you want to sit down and watch it while eating dinner. The TV is usually on the History Channel, or Discovery or something like that because we just never have the stuff we want in an easy-to-reach place. The whole business model of Netflix is as if it was created for people like me. Remove all roadblocks to getting movies onto my TV. For my $5 per month, all I’ve got to do is check the mail. Done.
Their rating and queueing systems are amazing, too. I ran through the whole rating game and rated about 30 movies initially, and the first 8 suggestions I got were all 5 star comedies in my book (even though I’d already seen them all). Without the rating system, finding something to watch is as bad as wandering around Blockbuster at 11pm with no idea what to grab. I think the effectiveness of the queueing system is evidenced by my queue length in about half an hour: 35 DVDs.
So yeah, now I’ve got like a year-long queue already on my account. I can’t wait to actually watch some stuff, instead of simply wanting to watch stuff.