Yay Netflix

So I guess I am lagging being the cutting edge of cooldom, but it has taken me this long to finally sign up for Netflix. I've known about it for years, of course, but always thought that I would never actually want to see a sufficient quantity of movies in a given month to justify the monthly fee. But with a young one in the house it seemed that we were making far too many trips to the local Blockbuster and paying way too much to rent a single disc. So I subscribed.

So far I am very impressed. There's a two day turnaround on discs: I drop a disc in the mail and I get another in two days. That's quite good. They seem to have access to just about anything that ever appeared on DVD. There's old TV shows (and some really old TV shows) that I will probably rewatch now because Netflix has them. I lose the ability to get a title now, but I gain access to lots of stuff I would never be able to get at the local place. For that I can put up with the lag time.

But here's the best thing of all. We have gone through probably 6 discs since signing up and every one of them has played flawlessly without the need for any cleaning. I would frequently get discs from Blockbuster that would not play without a thorough cleaning, and in some cases wouldn't play no matter how well I cleaned them. So hats off to the folks at Netflix! They know how to distribute clean discs!

I have also looked at their streaming capabilities. Although many titles I would want to watch are not available on-line, there are enough that I can make do those nights when nothing at all is on TV. I'm still not convinced that streaming will consistently deliver the same quality as DVD, which means it is still a long way off from delivering Blu-Ray quality consistently. But it will suffice as the occasional haven from inane reality shows and insipid dramedies.