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Jan. 25th, 2007 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenGuess 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::
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::
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Date: 2007-01-25 07:37 pm (UTC)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.