I *WAS* a 3 dvd account on Netflix

They were getting me for roughly $20/mo with the tax. That seems like a lot, but when we moved outside the town lines we found we had a hard time getting the dvds back to the rental place, and many months it cost us more than that for late charges, so the roughly $16 Netflix was charging at the time actually saved us money.

The costs rose a couple of time, including at the beginning of 2011 for 3 or 4 dollars. Now they want to raise it another 6 or 8. I cancelled the dvd portion of our contract the same day! I can't encourage that kind of mis-management.

I figured it out. I would be paying about $17 for the 3 dvds (meaning I can have 3 dvds out at any one time). Now interestingly that's about what I was paying when I signed up, why should that cause me heartburn? Because I would also have to pay an additional amount for the streaming service, $8 I think it was. I'll hang on to the streaming service for now, as it's cheap and we are still finding things to watch on there. But with the money I am saving on the dvds, I can rent 4 or 5 movies a month from Amazon or iTunes (at $3-4 per movie), and avoid dvds altogether. As there were many nights the Netflix dvds just sat, this will probably work out in my favor. I'll also check out Hulu again, as I have been ignoring them since they put out their premium subscription with ads deal.

Here's the bottom line. There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of great TV episodes and movies out there. Costs completely amortized by first run and syndication. They are making no money while they are being sat on and hid away. It's a gold mine. Netflix has demonstrated that digital streaming is scalable and cost-efficient.  People have shown their willingness to pay. Why, oh why do these media companies continue to lock the stuff away! The last 3 episodes? I'm not going to pay for that. Now give me the first 6 seasons, that's something I'll pay for.

Netflix, this was a stumble. You lost my dvd charges, and I’m going to carefully consider if the streaming is really worth it. I could trade that cost for 2 more of newer movies as well.

Watching multiple streams on Netflix

I did not know this, but it sounds like if you have the streaming only Netflix plan, you can only watch 1 stream at a time, whereas if you have a DVD plan, you can watch as many streams as the number of DVDs you can have out.

This becomes interesting if you have more than 1 way to watch Netflix streams. For instance the kids can watch a Netflix movie on the TV via the Wii, while Mom watches a Netflix TV show on the iPad in the bedroom. Meanwhile Dad watches a Netflix movie on his iPhone while traveling for business, all at the same time.

http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-multiple-streams-family-plans/

Vista 64 bit, Internet Explorer 64 bit, and Netflix Watch Now

It turns out that the Netflix "Watch Now" service doesn't work quite right on Vista 64 bit, if you try to use the 64 bit version of Internet Explorer that comes with Vista. You download the player and install it, and nothing further happens, no matter how many times you try (and no I'm not saying how many times I tried..). However just fire up the 32 bit version of Internet Explorer, and the service works fine.