You people and your internets nuttiness!

[trinityvixen]

As was pointed out to me, I generally talk about media stuffs on LJ and not a whole hell of a lot else. Even in my last post, I managed to sneak in media stuff. Impulse control, what is that?

Anywhoodle, I read blogs like this some times, and they had a post about this article in Time. It's neither an original complaint about Netflix--"I have to wait for movies!"--nor an entirely honest one as Time, being part of Time-Warner, has an interest in denigrating their competitor for paid streaming video service.

You can take apart this guy's fuddy-duddy curmudgeonly gripes far too easily to be worth bothering with. What I find hilarious is people on Hacking Netflix leaving comments to the link to this article saying this:

Yeah, let's tar and feather Richard Corliss! How dare he exercise his right of free speech in Time magazine; and of all places, in the USA.

Is it too much to ask that we all express just the Netflix Kool-aid drinking opinion on this blog? ;-)

Personally, I enjoy browsing video and book stores.

Left by Edward R Murrow! Of all people!

I just...you know, anyone is allowed to be an idiot on the internet. That's what it's there for (besides the porn, I mean). But going to a website that is pretty much dedicated to updating Netflix devotees on company developments and saying, "Gosh, do you have to like this so much?" is tantamount to wearing a Dolphins jersey to the Meadowlands. You just don't do it unless you're colossally stupid. Not only are you probably going to be savagely attacked, but...just...did you not think!? This is a site for people who worship the god of little red envelopes. Of course they're going to defend Netflix against all heathens.

(Amusing side note: that Time article hilariously generated a pop-up ad for Netflix when I clicked on the link.)

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

That sounded like many articles I've read bemoaning the death of local bookstores. You know, the kind that are badly-organized and never have what you want but are fantastic for browsing in. I have more sympathy for them, at least, in that I like picking up books and glancing through them--but then Amazon invented "look inside", and it seemed much less of a loss.

Mr. Moam Moan I Want My Instant Gratification apparently never went into a a rental place where the movie he wanted was checked out. Continuously. For weeks. A problem that won't exist when streaming video is perfected (and doesn't exist for on-demand pay-per-view now!)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's also the fact that the mom-and-pop video store was put out of business by Blockbuster, not Netflix. I'll grant him that probably Kim's suffered more for Netflix than others, but yeah, Netflix is behind that curve. They're just putting Blockbuster out of business. Businesses evolve!

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The article in PW on Micawber Books when it closed was priceless. In it, the owner of Micawber talked about how going into a bookstore should be a several hour long experience and how nobody has the proper appreciation anymore for reading over spine-out titles on packed bookshelves. I read that and thought...that? That right there, where you've modeled your store layout over nonexistent ideal customer behavior? That is why you are going out of business. Despite all the English professors' efforts to keep you afloat by assigning books there.

I did spend hours in Micawber when I was there. You know what I remember about that store? It had no children's section. No YA. No sci fi. No fantasy. No horror. Nothing that wasn't lit-er-a-ture. I found an annotated paperback edition of Stephen King's Carrie there on sale for $20. So I went to the B&N and bought the mass market for $8.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Client habits change, period. While the indie bookstore still has its charms, it has to either pare down to a specific retrograde clientele or else offer rare titles. (Or both.) But trying to straddle the divide between mass market titles and being the sort of shop where people browse for hours is just never going to work.