February 25, 2005

Netflixing

I signed us up for Netflix a couple of weeks ago. I kept seeing all these ads for it and people I know who are members said they liked it, so I figured why not? Actually, it was more because I went to the nearest Blockbuster to rent a French movie I had seen a few minutes of in French class, and the lamers didn't have it. PFFT, Blockbuster. I checked Netflix, they had it, so I signed up for their 2 week free trial. No problem.

So far we've received 6 movies, and there's about 105 in the queue. Most of them are older films I've just never gotten around to seeing, but there are some new releases too. We don't go to the theater very often. There's a distribution center 10 miles away from us, here in DFW, which makes the turnaround time really fast. I think 2 days is about as good as it can be - one day for the disk to get from us to them, and then another day to get the replacement.

I've been doing some research online (cause I have no life and I'm obsessive about these things). It seems that some people are unhappy with the turnaround time they get, and believe there are policies in place to throttle users from getting as many movies as they potentially could. Now, Netflix is apparently up front about giving priority to the lower-frequency user than higher-frequency, in case both have the same movie at the top of the queue and only one copy is available. But some people think they actually postpone saying they've received disks or shipping out new ones just to keep someone from getting it faster. There's not really any proof other than anecdotal evidence, but I'm interested to see how it turns out for us. I don't think we'll rent more than 10-12 per month, but that's enough for us to not be premium members, as such.

If any readers out there are Netflix members and interested in getting on our friends list, send me an email. It could be cool to see what we have in common and get recommendations.

Published: February 25, 2005
Editor: stacy