My Netflix experience was much like a gym membership. At first I was really into it, filling up my queue, watching movies all the time and after a while movies would sit on the counter for weeks unwatched. When I finally cancelled, all parallels to my gym vanished because they actually let me cancel. And for the record, after the gym membership expired I bought a Bowflex and it makes a great, albeit huge coat rack.

Hmmm....it states that you can download 18 hours worth of content per month, if you are on the 3-dvd-at-a-time plan. If it is not effecting the number of regular DVDs you have sent to you, then this is pretty damn cool. Sorta like how you can get free in store rentals through Blockbuster, in addition to your regular online rentals.

I hate to pick nits, but could we bother to capitalize the names of countries? Particularly the one in which we live?

WindowSeat

I'm currently trying to get out of a martial arts membership contract. I injured back pretty bad at my second class, apparently due to a pre existing condition. Still having persistant pain (this is about a month since). The school says they can work around the injury, yet it is Aikido, which is mostly throws and reversals. I'm off to my doctor's office tonight, to get whatever notes I can get. She doesn't want me to continue with the classes, but the Aikido school doesn't want to loose their money.

Electoral College Dropout: You said, "I hate to pick nits, but could we bother to capitalize the names of countries? Particularly the one in which we live?"

Dude, you dropped out of electoral college. Who are you to criticize? :p

AlteredBeast - you might want to try implying that instead of canceling your membership, you'd consider suing them for injuring your back. See if the $40/month is worth more to them than not being sued.

Ingen Angiven

That is an idea...but if they called my bluf, the medical info doesn't support the injury being due to negligence on their part. Hell, I didn't know I'd have this problem, otherwise I would have told them I had a back problem before hand.

Also....the membership isn't $40...it is $140 a month. So you can see why spending that money, and not taking classes, is getting under my skin.

I love Netflix however will these streaming movies be closed caption for the HI?

That is the excuse I use when I download Nurse Porn.

I am with windowseat on netflix - great idea, but I don't watch that many movies.

Could this new method of renting movies be an attempt to stop renters from making back-ups? It seems like it might be harder to take a streaming video file, and burn it to a DVD (for use in stand alone DVD players).

That was my question, can you burn these files to DVD so you can watch it on a plain TV? I have a 22" monitor, and while that is big, I would rather see it on my larger TV screen.

^^ My guess the way it streams, you don't store the whole movie on your HDD. Might even need to be played through whatever download they are talking about, and not be a format that is easily converted for use on a DVD player. Your best bet might be a video card with an s-video output.

They are close, but I am not watching movies on my computer screen. Now all they need is a small box that has HDMI and Optical audio output, that they sent to me for free. I hook it up and watch movies through that. That would be awesome.

Call me cynical and paranoid, but my first thought was "hmm I wonder if there'll be some sort of tracking software in that special download." Then there's the idea of ads to boot, like with the Tivo people.

I love Netflix almost as much as I love TiVo! (At least I did until very recently). They supposedly have a deal with TiVo in the works that would allow TiVo users that subscribe to Netflix the ability to stream the movie to TiVo!

That would change my life, especially since the turnaround time on DVDs has gotten absurd since I moved to the Chicago area last year. I'm now closer to a warehouse (I could literally drive there after work and pick up the damn DVDs) but it is somehow taking up to SIX days for the DVDs to get from Netflix to my apartment! Why can't the things I buy to make my life easier actually, you know, make my life easier?

Soooooo psyched.
The only thing I hate about Netflix is the wait.
@isadora - you are so right. Chicagoland is ridiculous, but at least it's slow on *all* mail, not just the Netflix. But I can't tell you how many times my dvds have come CRACKED or even broken in HALF due to bad handling from USPS.

isadora -- google netflix + throttling and see if that explains why your dvd turnaround time has increased.

Cindel brings up a really good point: will these be close-captioned? I think closed captions are better than subtitles on a TV, but I dunno how well it works on the player program so I can't say if it's good.