Netflix Once Again
Last weekend I joined Netflix for the third time. I had joined last summer when I was able to see 45 movies in 4 months. I don't even want to try to see that many movies this summer, but I did want to get caught up on some classics, plus some things things that have come out on DVD since then. Also, my queue at Netflix from last time still had over 30 movies in it (though a lot of them were iffy at best).
I was able to quickly add another ten or fifteen movies to my old queue and have already watched Casino Royale, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Night at the Museum with The Godfather, Part II coming through my mail slot this morning. I added some old silent movies with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton that had made AFI's Top 100 list along with other classics like The Searchers and The Maltese Falcon, that I have never seen.
Probably what pushed me into going ahead with Netflix again this year was they sent me a coupon for 20% off my first three months. Since I would only be in it for 3-4 months, that was a very good discount. That brought the $14.99 2-at-a-time plan down to only $11.99. Within a day or two of joining I got an e-mail saying they were dropping the price of that plan to $13.99 and still giving me 20% of of that, so now it will only be $11.19 a month (plus tax).
Another factor was that even though I am able to rent DVD's from Kroger for $1.00, the selection in the machine is limited to only new releases and most of the very newest movies are not available (either it takes a while or they are rented out already). Plus you have to leave the house twice, and all of that hassle. And don't get me started on Blockbuster. Susan and I rented Shrek from there recently since she had never seen it, and it was over $4 for one old movie.
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Comments (2)
Netflix has a new feature called "Watch Now" where you watch a movie on your computer. It isn't much use to me since I have dialup internet, but tonight I dropped by Susan's to check on the cats while she is out of town. Since she has broadband, I tried it out. Her download speed is about 500 kbps, which only qualifies for "basic," a grainy picture that takes up about a 7-inch window on the screen. I watched an episode of The Office from Season 2. It's great for something like that because an episode is only 20-23 minutes. However the selection isn't great. Out of 50 movies in my queue, only a handful were available for online viewing. You can watch online for 15 hours per month in addition to your regular disk mailings. Kind of neat.
Posted by UT | July 10, 2007 8:23 PM
I canceled Netflix just before I would be billed for my fourth month and after receiving my last two movies of the third month (I have a week to return them). I watched 12 movies the first month, 9 the second (which included a week of vacation), and 11 the last. Generally the movies would ship in one day or would get there Monday if I mailed them Saturday before 3. But Netflix had computer problems that caused delays a couple of times, one disk was cracked on arrival (not because of the dogs, thank goodness), and a couple of the movies were shipped from places other than Norcross. Most annoyingly, with one of the disks it took Netflix a day to realize they would ship from elsewhere and then two days for the disk to arrive from there. That was the only time they didn't send a new movie the same day they received one from me. So the service was generally great.
Movies I liked: Letters From Iwo Jima, The Maltese Falcon, All the President's Men, An Inconvenient Truth, Lone Star, V for Vendetta, and Breach.
Disappointing movies: Memoirs of a Geisha, The Wild Bunch, The Prestige, The Man Who Knew Too Much (James Stewart and Doris Day version), and Happy Feet.
I watched one silent movie, Buster Keaton's The General, and thought it was interesting for what it was, but kind of boring (plus the music didn't fit: it was just some classical songs whose tempo didn't always match what was going on in the movie; I thought for silent movies that an organ player would play live so he could match the mood). I also rented the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and thought that despite a few good gags, it was kind of boring as well. After watching the lame The Wild Bunch, I decided to stay away from the John Wayne westerns like The Searchers as well. So mostly I caught up on newer movies instead of going back to old one.
Posted by UT | September 22, 2007 9:47 AM