(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

Guess who is ridiculously excited about this?

Okay, so the drawbacks are many. So what if I've refreshed my Netflix page since I read it and still no dice on them making it work for me? So what if I can only watch a few thousand movies--I'm willing to bet there's at least a couple thousand I won't have seen on there!

This is brilliant. You know how some of you have looked at the new iPhone and gone all boneless with pleasure? This is how I feel about this service. I was sure Netflix would have to do something pretty special to compete with Blockbuster, and now they have. Blockbuster finally managed to one-up Netflix with allowing for their rent-at-home service to include rent-and-return to their stores, solving the problem of yes, you can rent a hundred movies, but what if you wanted a new one right now?

And now Netflix has come up with their own answer. Structurally speaking, not enough people will have the equipment at home to make this--on the surface--seem competitive with Blockbuster (plenty of people have Blockbuster stores nearby and nice home theater systems; fewer have great internet/wireless coverage and computers to handle the streaming). On the other hand, people are getting to that point, vastly preferencing high-speed internet access, and faster computers are getting cheaper all the time with better components capable of handling this service. Also, software and servers to house these movies digitally would cost less than real estate to rent a store, doing an end-run around costs accrued by the Blockbuster model. Factor in wages not lost to employees or damage done to property, and I'd say Netflix is looking to run much more in the black than Blockbuster.

Will it take a while for this to be the norm? Maybe. But the prevalence of YouTube and Google Video will groom people to the service, so they're going to come at it savvy enough to use it and be comfortable with the format. Also, concerns about people not "gathering together around the PC" are being made obsolete by the blending of home entertainment to encompass the internet as well as the hi-def TV. Maybe it's just the geek in me, but I know plenty of people who happily watch movies on laptops or at their computer. I do it if I don't have time to commandeer the TV in our house, and I don't suffer for it. I don't miss special features much either (the exception last night was This Film is Not Yet Rated because those extras were bitching and worth staying up until 3 am for). The pricing is right (you pay nothing more for the streaming, just you get as many hours as you sink dollars into Netflix, and if that isn't a hook more sweet than the guy giving you the first hit for free, I don't know what is), the company sound....eeeee!!!!

::refreshes Netflix homepage::

Comments

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Sounds better than other systems, but I am materialistic, goddammit! I'm paying for the box and the pictures and the extras and all that! I like having that stuff! I think internet-movie-watching will carve out a niche, sure, perhaps even a wildly profitable one, but some people (like myself) will stick to the hard-copy DVD (or whatever) format.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Erm, says the guy who posted a full movie on LiveJournal. But that's not available on DVD like that, you'd have to torrent and burn it yourself, so that's different.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

^.~ read my post--no judging here!

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

You should definitely watch The Thief and the Cobbler.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

CAn't at work, but will at home if I remember. You know how long it takes me to get to these things? I think Brick has only just come into the top ten on my queue.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree. I don't watch movies online and then not buy them if I really like them. I'm still mostly that way with CDs (except where I can't get the CD, and then I will buy a download). I might watch a movie digitally, but if I liked it a lot, I would buy it rather than save it to my hard drive. Part of that is paranoia about losing it if hardware dies on me, but also it's just nice to see what I have in my collection rather than having to drag up my computer every time. I don't think this is the death of DVD. Music went digital because there's really no reason that the sound can't be contained as well on a hard drive as a CD. Movies will go digital, but there are so many factors that make playing a movie not on a computer more popular that they won't displace DVD players and TVs (people don't just sit and watch movies a lot of the time--and not being able to do stuff on my computer when watching something EVER would drive me apeshit; sometimes, yes, all times? No, thanks, give me my DVD player).

Why I'm excited about this is that it makes room for more rentals when I'm waiting for others, which means I can clear more movies and such out of my own personal queue without having to wait. Those are mostly "I should see this" type of movies, not ones I'm renting to see about buying. I rent lots of stuff from Netflix I would never buy but just want to see (they can be good: Spooks; or bad: Bloodrayne). The fact that you pay nothing extra and still get a pretty decent chunk of movie time to stream is making me jump for joy. Because with the two-at-a-time plan, I would still get 15-16 hours. Hell, there are people I know who return their movies to Netflix so slow they wouldn't even get through that many hours in a month, but I could! 15 hours is nearly ten average-length movies, so anywhere from seven to ten movies in total. If TV shows get added, you could get through an entire season of a half-hour show, which you could do in installments each night instead of having to watch all the ones on a disc sent to you or else lose out on a rental while you went through the show over the course of a week. These are things I think about, and thus EXCITEMENT!

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at least for now, this is meant to replace renting, not buying. And what amounts to "Netflix with instant gratification" is going to eat into the storefront DVD rental business even more than Netflix already has.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Gotta give Netflix credit--they aren't slouches. They're innovative and clever and they haven't just rested while the others caught up. I thought with the Blockbuster in-store return thing that maybe they were finally met as equals, but this will blow Blockbuster away. As soon as it, you know, actually goes into effect.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Didn't Bill Gates and I say this to you during all the hand-wringing over HDDVD-vs-BluRay? It's not even the first decent movie-streaming service, just the first decent one on the Internet (and the pricing model is not bad compared to rentals via digital cable). It's just going to continue to mature, get more competition in the market, etc. There probably will be "buy a title", "rent a title", or "access to a catalog" services, just like there are now with online music (well, dunno if you can rent songs anywhere, as that'd be silly). Then a hardware company will partner with a service and make a DVD player (or similar) that can also connect to Netflix to browse and stream without a full PC. Really, it's about time. I mean, 1.6Mbps? Some of us have been sitting on 15Mbps for some time now.... (Of course, as with their catalog, there are more licensing hurdles than technical ones.)

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

My computer/wireless often produces poor streaming, and I'm one of those people who takes two weeks at least per movie, so I'm not overly excited about this (or the iPhone for that matter). I didn't know about the metering system, but that seems fair enough.

I also still prefer watching on a large TV, but the laptop is definitely fine in a pinch and I don't really mind it anymore. I think this new service will be a good thing, though it may just tie people to their TVs/computers even more than they already are.

It seems if Netflix is worried about overloading the system, they should roll it out to subscribed with the fewest number of hours of viewing first...

Meanwhile, I'm trying to resist checking out Blockbuster's plan, but it does sound pretty convenient.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

If anything, this might really lead the push to integrate internet with the rest of home entertainment. We're close, what with cable and satellite companies offering internet, but we're not there yet. But if you could have a streaming piece of hardware other than a computer to use this service on, like you do with cable, sorta, you'd sell this like gangbusters.

I was just thinking that, with decent enough wi-fi areas cropping up, you'd be able to netflix movies while waiting in an airport, which is awesome.

And Blockbuster's plan is convenient, if you have one near you. Netflix is sort of my only option--the service they provide anyway--such that in-store options aren't useful to me, but I totally get how they are for others. Especially, say, my mother, who wouldn't really get the making up of a queue thing (she doesn't do things planned out, they're usually more spontaneous).

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

3 problems with this new model:

1: Windows Vista won't correctly play HD video. The DRM they programmed in keeps the system from streaming video in HD. Idiots. Though not a huge problem, since HD isn't quite the viewing standard yet.

2: Not significantly better than iTunes. You're effectively paying $2 per movie viewing, you can't rewatch the movie if it's good, and if you have a good enough internet connection to watch decent quality streaming video, you have a good enough connection that it won't take more than an hour or two to download a movie using a different service.

3: Not enough of a library. This is the only reason I didn't subscribe to Vongo after doing their 1 week sample, because their model is more like Napster's--pay a flat fee per month, and you can download as many movies as you want. The problem is that there weren't that many movies on the site worth watching that didn't have an additional pay-per-view fee. This problem may go away once the idiot media congolomerates realize that it's better to get a dollar or two from this kind of rental than nothing.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

Actually, isn't the streaming free? You're paying for being able to rent DVDs through the mail, and this is just gravy. I doubt anyone will sign up only to stream video, though that's a possibility.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Counter-Points:
1) Glad we agree that the hi-def stuff isn't definitive at all. I thought it would be, sooner rather than later, once the porn industry threw in behind HD-DVD, but that's gotten complicated, too. The fact that, with a fast enough processor, you can get video that's good as DVD is enough for this kind of service.

2) Actually, you pay nothing for this. You are getting this as a bonus for having a Netflix account anyway. And if you break it down by the math-by-hours, it works like this: $10 gets you one-at-a-time DVD rentals for a month, and let's say that you rent one a week, so you have 4 rentals or about eight hours (using your $2 movie math, where avg movie = 2 hours at $1/hr). Through this program, you would then have more movies streaming time to the tune of 10 hours. That's 18 altogether, for $0.56 per hour, or a little over a dollar per movie. If you make the most of Netflix service, you can double the movies you rent by mail and it comes to $0.80 a movie. That's not only not bad, that's phenomenal! And, like I said, they're not raising prices to accomodate this (not yet ::knock on wood::) so, really, you're just paying whatever you pay for your service and being given X amount of hours free movies (for me, as a compulsive watch-and-return user on 2-at-a-time, I would get streams bringing my movie avg cost to $0.40 per movie).

If your bent is enough to own with digital, this isn't the service for you. This is definitely catering towards renters, which, if you have Netflix for any length of time, you become pretty hardcore about (I spent months with like eight movies on my queue and now I'm in triple digits because I save or add anything that might interest me and look at it again when it comes closer to the top). Since nine-tenths of what I rent I don't ever intend to buy, I just pay for the rights to experience once, this suits me and probably the other 99% of Netflix users just perfectly. When I like something a lot, I'll buy it.

3) Digital movie libraries are atrocious as is. I think that iTunes, while clearly the leader, is still only in the low thousands, and Netflix is poised to jump in with 5,000 titles to start? They'll chip away at iTunes easily. They seem to have a really good head for which movies to offer, too, covering both classics, comedy, and newer films that tend to represent the gamut of the types of films people most often want to see on the spur of the moment and would therefore want to stream. Something tells me that you get a lot more people going, "Hey, Zoolander is hilarious, let's watch that," than you would, "Ooh, obscure Catherine Deneuve film! What? No stream?!"

Where they really would do well, and how they could utterly destroy iTunes would be by securing television show streams. If Netflix has a failing it's that it cannot streamline watching habits with TV on DVD. If you want to go slowly with a show over a few days when there are four episodes on a disc, your per-disc average price goes up. Your other option would be to watch it all in one night, requiring a) a night to watch it all in and b) fortitude and maintained interest in doing so (not always possible, even for me, and that's saying something). But, if you could spread out your 10-18 hours of streaming over a week to get through a TV show, you could set your own time to watch. It would be like TiVO for your Netflix, which I predict will be huge because, again, if you're renting the show on Netflix to begin with, it's either because you don't intend to buy it or you're trying to catch up to a new season. iTunes has you covered with the current and newest seasons, so if you want current, go there. If you want to catch up with season upon season, you go to Netflix where you don't pay $2 per episode and then wait for the next season and use real TiVO.

That's the power I see right there, the thing with DRM that these labels don't get. The company better able to provide the choice of when to watch what and put that choice in the hand of the consumer...wins.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

This rocks. I'm going to need a more comfortable set-up in front of my computer.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh fantastic! You're excited too! I am so excited, it's not even topic for polite conversation how much!

Yes, it's time to outfit my desk for the cinema!

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

okay link says i have to subscribe to the NY times???
:(
but i dont wanna :(

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You don't have to. You sign up for the free account and you can read it.

Basically, Netflix is streaming videos soon, and I am creaming my shorts over it!

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

point one...thats a really fucked up mental image....just a thought

second point, sounds right up your alley :D

btw, if you watched the SotU address the other night and noticed the whole creepy Bush/Chaney drinking water thing its on Youtube now :D

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Ugh, what? I was distracted by Nancy Pelosi blinking every three seconds. I wanted to reach through the screen to get her hair out of her eyes.

Also, poor Teddy Kennedy. He's like so old and he has to put up with this shit.

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

at one point chaney and bush stopped at the same time, paused, and drank water at the same time...you really have to see it

but if you ever wondered if our current administration are really automatronic and not live people, this would pretty much make you wonder...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, aren't you supposed to drink the water but have the puppet keep talking if you're a good ventriloquist?

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

LOL

very true
maybe that is why bush had to stop talking when cheney and him drank at the same time, whoever controling them both had to take a breath?