Saturday, January 31, 2009

Netflix

So, Jessi and I bit the bullet and signed up for Netflix. We're still newbies and learning how the system works, but so far we're really satisfied.

Netflix is a hometown hero located in Los Gatos, CA. Visit Netflix.com and sign up for a monthly subscription. You can then choose from thousands of movies (So far, they had every movie and TV show I wanted) and add them to your queue. Netflix will ship each movie to you starting at the top of your queue. We signed up for one movie at time with unlimited returns. Once we receive and watch our movie, we return in their provided envelope and Netflix will send us our next movie when it returns. It's really a simple and easy system.

We decided to sign up for a couple of reasons. First, we have been watching TV shows on Fancast.com and Hulu.com for a while. We don't have a TV and so this made the most sense. The price was right (free) and the commercials are easy to deal with - espcially since Firefox's AdBlock add-on blocked all of them. This has worked great for current seasons, but didn't work for older seasons becuase only a few shows would be available. I think the goal was to wet our appetite to get us to buy the full season on iTunes or something. I guess it kind of worked because we've added all the back seasons to shows we're currently watching.

We also had a growing list of movies we'd like to see, but were never getting around to actually watching. Instead, we found ourselves randomly surfing the net looking for something, anything, to watch. This was OK, but ultimately not as satisfying as we'd like. Now we'll be regularly getting movies we actually want to see. I realize we're still spending time watching TV, but somehow it feels better.

Finally, I was getting tired of constantly waiting for the shows to buffer. I didn't think I had a slow Internet connection, but it really doesn't like Hulu at all. So far, we've found Netflix's Instant Watch service to work OK. It's not perfect, but I think there's definitely less buffering.



Our first movie was Dirty Harry. For years my dad has been harrassing me for not seeing it. It is a classic and actually a really good movie. Also, I finally got to hear that famous line myself:

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

We've got some other exciting ones lined up and added a widget on the side so you can see what's next. Feel free to make movie suggestions below so we can add them to our queue.

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