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NetFlix
... random thoughts , netflix
sun 2005-jan-02 17:21:30 pst
... permalink
We've decided to sign up for NetFlix. For a while, I'd been a
proponent of the theory that instead of signing up for NetFlix, it
would make sense to just buy one DVD each month. I figure that would
cost roughly the same amount, and would gradually accumulate a nice
library of movies. Of course it only actually gives you more options
for things to watch (that you haven't already seen) if you don't watch
very many movies each month. But I figure we kind of tend to go in
and out of phases of watching a lot and not so many, so it seemed a
plausible system.
In the end, the main problem with that theory is that actually buying
a DVD each month is a lot more effort than having NetFlix simply send
you the next thing in your queue whenever you're done with the
previous... But in any case, I think NetFlix will also have the
advantage of encouraging us to actually watch more movies, since we'll
figure, oh, we better watch this and send it back and get the next
one. Also, a lot of the DVDs we already own we haven't watched, in
part because, well, there's never any reason to watch such-and-such
film now -- we can always watch it another time. With NetFlix,
we'll feel more pressure to just watch what we have. And if we watch
movies more often, then we won't feel we have to always choose the
best possible movie to watch now, we'll be free to simply choose one
of the three NetFlix discs we currently have, whatever they happen to
be, and just watch that.
Anyway, so we just signed up yesterday, and we already have over 120
movies in our queue -- a lot more than the total number of movies we
watched in 2004! Since clearly we won't be using the NetFlix queue in
a strictly FIFO fashion, there will almost certainly be discs added to
the end of the queue that stay near the end as other things keep
getting bumped ahead of them. But I guess there's nothing really
wrong with that.
Any experienced NetFlix users out there want to share words of wisdom
with the newbies?
mail me
... comments (2)
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