Netflix on demand
I am loving this Netflix on demand stuff. For no increase in the monthly cost, you can watch thousands of things whenever you want. Today Comcast announced an increase of something like another 10% in their cost, and they’re making it difficult to not go digital (at an additional cost, plus equipment rental). Feh on that! Paying $60 something a month to watch nothing on account of a writer’s strike, forcibly subsidizing dozens of religious and shopping channels, and for what?
This stuff works really well. The only fault I find is that it requires MS Media Player 11 which I was reluctant to install, but it doesn’t seem to have caused any harm (cross fingers). That also means it only works in IE (boo!). They need to fix that. But if that’s the only site I visit with IE, it’s not as bad as it could be. Still, they should follow the lead of Hulu and AOL and not require IE. Then again, neither Hulu nor AOL deals with DRM. AOL’s implementation also sucks. Hulu is the better of the two, by far, but doesn’t have the selection that AOL does.
But back to Netflix. They need to work a bit on their cataloging. It’s hard to find things. They have only so many items per page and you have to scroll through them all one-by-one until you get what you want. Say you’re working your way through season 1 of some tv series and you know it’s on the next to last page of the catalog. Of course you could search, but you have to know what you’re searching for. I found a whole new cache of things by browsing via network rather than genre. (All Red Dwarf series are available, as are a boatload of Dr. Who, Yes, Minister, Christie, and so on.)
Awesome deal. And now that the number of rentals is unlimited, who needs cable?
