Slashdot Mirror
That Nagging Netflix Queue
"Busy people hate traditional rental stores because you rent some movies, pay for them, get busy and can't watch them, and then return them 3 days later unwatched. Or, equally likely, you return them 6 days later and pay late fees for the movie you didn't watch."
"I could never return a rental ontime. It was more like a week or 2 after it was do. With the extra late fees added to the rental, it was cheaper to buy the movie. I just bought the movies instead. Of course, this was when I was single and had money to burn."
"Now with a wife and kids, there is no time to goto the movies. Netflix is great to catch up on the movies I missed. Plus, I can easily rent questionable movies like King Kong and Napoleon Dynamite without having to pay $50 to see it in the theater ($10 for 2 people, $20 for food, $20 for a babysitter)."
If there really is a "paradox of abundance," paying customers aren't the only ones who experience it; Brix Braxton writes that the same ennui affects the casual software copier, too:
"This reminds me of when I was a kid and had my first 8-bit computer -- for the first few months I bought all of my software one tape at a time. I would play the games, good or bad all the way through -- picking through every nugget I could find, playing some games for weeks on end."
"Some time later, I met a friend at school who had the same computer and offered to bring his disks over. Holy cow -- he must have had two hundred disks of software that I spent a weekend or two copying. That pretty much killed it for me since I didn't really have any pressure to play anything and since I didn't invest anything into the software -- I would just load a game, decide it didn't look all that great and move on to the next."
And reader bman08 says that "owning movies is even worse," writing
"There are something like 345 DVDs on my shelves at home and it would not, in a million years, occur to me to actually watch one... Those movies are for even later, after the Netflix movies. I've often found myself watching Pan'n'scan versions on cable of movies I own for this reason... the TV schedule provides a compelling reason to watch."
SloppyElvis renames the phenomenon of oversupply matched with underuse "Paradox of Consumption." He writes
"The converse of this paradox is also one. Accumulating as much of a product as possible to maximize the value of the monetary expense, even if doing so adversely affects your enjoyment of that product, illustrates a strange consequence of consumerism."
"The obvious example is that of the person who consumes far beyond a comfortable and enjoyable amount of food at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The value for the price is determined to be "volume of food" rather than enjoyment of the meal. Would someone consciously pay for a sick stomach?"
"For some, Netflix is approaching this valuation on "volume of movies" rather than convenience or even personal enjoyment/satisfaction of the service."
Writing "You don't want what you think you want," reader voidstin has some suggestions about the psychological dilemma posed by all-one-can-eat rentals:
"Of course we want to see Hotel Rwanda, or the new Almodovar film, because we are advanced, modern intellectuals. In reality, after a 12-hour day of re-factoring someone else's messy code, would you rather open a beer and collapse in front of Hotel Rwanda or Super Troopers?"
"The problem is Netflix (and TiVo) makes you confront this issue -- You have to send it back and quit on it. You have to admit that you don't want to watch Hotel Rwanda. You'd rather fast forward to the 'good parts' of The Girl Next Door rather than think about genocide. You are not the advanced, modern intellectual you thought you were. Who wants an existential crisis when they thought they were just renting movies? Is this horrible? Probably. So is alcoholism, but I bet you didn't cringe when I opened a beer in the above paragraph."
Reader Gadgetfreak supplies another psychological explanation for the unwatched-movie pile in many households:
"[T]he bigger and more complicated a decision, the easier it is for me to decide. Choosing a college: Simple. I went, I looked, and by the time I needed to apply, I'd already decided. Only applied to 1 school. (Graduated 3 + years ago, picked up a dual Engr. degree, and had a blast). Buying a car? Simple. I knew what I wanted. Buying a house? Simple. (Going on 2 years now, still satisfied)."
"But man... you put me in front of a vending machine and I cannot make up my friggin mind. I'm not kidding. I can't decide. I'll stand there staring at it."
Ackthpt suggests yet another reason: that a movie sometimes needs the viewer to be in a mood suited to it, and that it's hard to predict emotional states:
"[S]tuff coming in like clockwork isn't the way my tastes for music or film are sated. On impulse I'll suddenly whip out and buy an Etta James collection, because I like some tune she sang back in the days of yor or I'll buzz down to the Bijou and check out Superman Returns From Wherever He Buggered Off To, but I don't do these with any chartable frequency. I tend to buy music, DVDs or old radio plays to listen to on trips or when I feel like it. Having stuff come in on a robotic schedule just isn't going to work, no matter how good the deal."
Reader MagikSlinger lays some blame (if blame is the right word) on the queuing system used by Netflix, which he compares to that of Zip.ca, which allows a user to set some movies on hold ("Park"), and suggests
"Arbitrarily ranking the queue (which I understand Netflix allows) is handy if you know you're going to watch things, but maybe they need to ask the user: I really want to watch this, I wouldn't mind watching this, and 'Eh, a friend told me i should watch it.'"
Reader Quiet_Desperation wants to know why anyone should be so worked up about a choice that's all about luxuries in the first place. He writes
"My job has been very busy lately, and Elder Scrolls IV wandered into my life, so I simply cut back my Netflix account to two out at a time down from four. I can just about slip in two movies a week. If I can't do that, I'll cut back to one. There's also the 'rip to hard drive' option to backlog films."
"Feeling "pressure" to watch a movie? What would these "paradox of abundance" sufferers do if they had to go out and hunt a woolly mammoth for dinner? Cripes, take a Paxil or something."
(One reader's response: "I'm pretty much sure they'd starve to death -- the woolly mammoths have been real scarce this year.")
Dephex Twin, too, wants to know What's the problem?, and writes:
"I don't really see what's so bad about this. It's there, and maybe you get around to watching it and maybe you don't."
"One positive thing that I have noticed since I started Netflix is that I watch a lot less movies that I *don't* care about much. Back when I used to go to the video store, I might have a few movies in mind, and maybe these movies would be in, or not, or maybe I remember my mental list, or maybe not. But at that point, I've driven to the video store, so I'm leaving with at least one movie. So, I spend 45 minutes to finally decide on something that I don't even care about, just so my trip wasn't a total loss."
SydShamino takes a different tack, and writes that he's "been watching more movies that I really don't care about. With rentals, it's hard to pay good money for crap movies like 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (currently at the top of my queue). With Netflix, though, assuming I watch and turn it relatively quickly, I'm only paying $0.80 or so for the rental -- and that money is hidden away in a monthly fee that I pay anyway. Given that my tastes wander enough to appreciate B, C, and D-grade science fiction, this is a good deal."
Slashback: Where a dupe is not a dupe.
How about an article about the Nagging Slashdot Dupe Queue..
Netflix will send a movie out quickly, but it is still too slow for most.
;)
Sometimes a movie comes that you don't really want to watch right away, you wait until you have the time or are in the mood for it, but by then a couple days may pass.
What would be better is if they put everything in an instant on-demand service, rather than deal with US Mail, hectic time schedules and mood swings
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Those backslash stories belong to another site, something like "metaslashdot.org". It doesn't make sense to rehash the same thing is the same slashdot format.
...is that I forget to rewind the DVDs before I return them.
Seriously, with all the crappy movies out there and so little time, why bother. People feel obligated to rent movie from Netflix because they are paying regardless every month. That to me is just stupid unless you're an avid movie watcher. Most people find themselves out of time between reading, surfing the net, etc.
http://religiousfreaks.com/If there was anything that I got out of that it is that services like Netflix are good for different people for different reasons. Meaning that for some it allows them the freedom to watch them at a lesiurly pace. For others it is the frantic rate at which you can watch and return vast volumes of movies. For others it is just the great selection. Netflix will often carry movies that Blockbuster (and other brick and mortar companies) won't because of the low volume of rentals.
Anyway, the real story is that choices for consumers is a good thing. Some people would never use Netflix because they enjoy the trips to Blockbuster...browsing, touching, feeling. Others like the community feedback that an on-line store provides. People will decide what works best for them...and that is a good thing.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
I had so many Slashdot Netflix storeis to potentially read I ended up leaving them all on the shelf to gather dust.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Push that Backslash radio button all the way to the left. Off my homepage now!
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome
I rented 'Groundhog Day' last February, but I still haven't watched it. Every morning I wake up thinking I will watch it, but I get sidetracked reading about
I saw myself in the Hotel Rwanda example. That very movie sat on a shelf for a week and a half before we watched it. We knew it was going to be a tough one and wanted to wait until we were "ready" to watch it. Very good movie, by the way.
I didn't see my biggest problem discussed. My wife stays home with the kids and will, on occasion, watch a movie by herself. I then have to figure out how to watch the movie when my kids and my wife are either asleep or out of the house. That generally means watching it in multiple installments at 5:30 in the morning.
The longest we ever kept something was over a month and we sent it back without watching it.
DD
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
I guess the irony here, kids, is that the front-running related article, right beneath the text of this article is yesterday's "Netflix Users Experience Paradox of Abundance".
::Colz Grigor
So clearly the tools exist to check for similar content, which leaves me wondering which of the following is true:
A) The tools are not made available for editors to research if an article is going to be a duplicate, or
B) The editors (okay, not all of them) don't bother researching...
Hrmmmm...
...trivial to say on this uninteresting subject, here's the story again, and this time we'll help you by providing a selection of trivial and uninteresting comments that you can copy and paste into your own trivial and uninteresting replies.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I'm going to post this one anonymously since you never know where the agents of copyright are hiding, especially with 200,000 Chinese kids on the hunt.
I'm not much into movies, frankly, but I am heavily into music and software. When broadband, CD burners, and a news host with a good alt.binaries.* feed came into my life, I downloaded music and software like a fiend. It was all free, and there was an ass-ton of it. It ended up consuming a lot of time, downloading, repacking, renaming, and organizing everything. My mp3 collection topped 60,000 tracks. That's bloody ridiculous, of course, since I could spend most of the rest of my life listening to that without repeating.
You know what? I got sick of it. It was too much stuff, and just organizing it so I could access it effectively was a tremendous time suck. I still have it, of course, and I still use some of it, but weirdly, I have ended up buying more music CDs and software titles from retail stores since then than I ever did before. It's more... manageable. I seldom ever bother with downloading pirated mp3s anymore.
The underlying psychology, I think, is that we are accustomed to scarcity, both in terms of our evolutionary heritage and our personal histories as consumers. Suddenly confronted by ridiculous abundance, it's very hard to develop a balanced approach. And this isn't just piracy or movie rentals. It's everything. How much time do people spend in malls or Wal-Mart or other stores looking for something to spend money on -- as opposed to going to a store with a specific purchase in mind? Human hoarding behavior is pretty much what you'd expect if you took a bunch of primates out of the marginal semi-arid plains of Africa and, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, dumped them in the middle of post-Christmas sales in a gigantic mall. We're hard-wired to expect that anything we don't snatch right away will be picked up by a competitor, and that wiring continues to be active even after the conditions that produced it no longer exist.
(Despite this being a Dupe, it gives me the chance to post some thoughts and possibility of people moderating them ;-) )
I've been using Netflix for the last 2 years. And it's been awesome for me. There have been a lot of good shows that for one reason or another I was never able to watch completely (Farscape, Firefly, Stargate SG-1, a couple of anime series). Sure I could have gone out and bought the series box sets, but in some cases I hadn't watched the whole series to make it worthwhile to buy.
Also since I rarely watch TV, Netflix is a nice alternative for me when I want to watch something. Not only that but I can watch something I'm interested in instead of the boring TV series that seem to be up now. Currently, I've been devouring season after season of Stargate SG-1, with 3-4 DVDs a week.
If instead I wanted to watch several theatre releases, I could see things being left on the shelf and eventually making their way back. I've had a few movies that I rented and didn't really watch.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
I notice some times the return address will go to a different state. This can add 2-5 days to the time it takes to return a DVD.
My solution is to print out a bunch of labels with the address of the closest Netflix return address and use the labels every time you're given a return envelope with an out of state address.
Ever since I got into this whole pirating routine, I've found myself paradoxically enjoying my entertainment far less than I have before. It seems like having a neverending supply of game ROMS, movies and TV shows available to me should be a great thing, but I mostly find myself hoarding a bunch of stuff that I never watch. I try to find excuses to buy stuff instead of downloading it. My friends call me crazy, but in all honesty, the satisfaction of going out and spending my hard-earned money on something just makes me appreciate it more. I've found myself buying a lot more books lately, since the book is one experience that just can't be emulated. Every time I buy a book, I read it from beginning to end, and usually enjoy the experience. None of my books ever go half-finished, I don't get bored of them in favor of picking up another book, or cycling through a ton of books. Having an incredible amount of options avaiable to me is, ultimately, unfulfilling.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
I have had a couple of movies out since May. MAY. I have watched a few DVDs of television episodes and sent them back, and now have two movies waiting for my attention. Why? Because I have a wife, kids, a gym membership, and volunteer at my church - not to mention the insane demands my job puts on me. I bet all of you have one or more of these to contend with as well. Do I love Netflix; despite the fact that my 30 day trial got me new movies much much faster than they do now that I'm paying for them, even if I "sit" on a movie for a couple of weeks? You bet! I don't have a deficit at any local rental store (ahem you owe 25 dollars in late fees before you can rent that 2.99) and I don't even have to go to that part of town anymore; saving me outrageous amounts of time and I don't have to take any of those kids with me in the process.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Is it just me or is Slashdot turning more and more like Digg+1hr or Digg+1day? Don't get me wrong, I prefer Slashdot over Digg any day of the week, but lately its been very noticeable.
Chums up, let's do this!
Do I need to elaborate on the intricacies of how dust will settle on a Netflix envelope?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I wasted 15 minutes of my life reading the original article - now we have an article *about* the article?
Fut The Whuck?
Someone mentioned "hat to me is just stupid unless you're an avid movie watcher", but what if we are? This household, has no issues using Netflix, the one time we actually had to wait for a movie (week of 06/06/06 after we watched the newer version of The Omen, I found out DH had never seen the original one, so we waited like a week for it). Was not that much of a problem really. We watch tons of movie, and this service well deff. come in handy since we are expecting first child and will have less time to go out to the Digital Theater here in town to see in THX. If your movies sit around for a really long ass time collecting dust, thats only your own fault. Sometimes we get busy and dont watch it the first day we receive it (maybe 2 days at the most), running a Hosting company and having another FT job, besides normal household duties - but still, IMHO if we can find time, Im sure the most of you can (pause from reading slashdot even for an hour or so, and theres your time, or downloading p0rn, whatever your choice is). krinsh I can agree with you....like I said above, DH with FT job, Hosting company, 5 pets, 7 months pregnant now, even with your life being hectic, you can manage at your own time to watch what you want - if not, then its just sheer laziness. :)
The whole point of the Slashback things is that they collect interesting comments from previous stories - in this case the very story you mentioned. This content is not similar so much as it is condensed.
I like the idea of SLashback but would like to see more editorial commentary from the grouper.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey can we get a post about the comments in this post about comments?
People aren't watching movies because they're too busy finding stories to dupe on Slashdot!
I posted this in the original thread, but http://replaylink.com/ is a service where you can buy and sell used DVDs (as well as CDs and video games). They send you a postage paid mailer just like Netflix, so the convenience is about the same. You can buy something, keep as long as you want, and then turn around and sell it. The shipping fee and seller fee together are about the same as a rental. If you only watch a few movies a month or go on vaccation or something, it's cheaper than the netflix subscription fee.
What does it matter to Netflix? They still get their payment. And to the subscribers? Stop paying for nothing if you ain't gonna watch 'em!
Why else would there be a slashdot article summarizing comments from a slashdot article?
Help find a cure for cancer!
Until they backslash the backslash?
RSS?
Now it's just a summary of the original discussion, which is a complete waste of everyone's time. Those of us who cared enough to read the comments probably already did, and if not, those comments are all still there.
(For the inevitable jackass: I have removed Backslash in my prefs, but since I don't subscribe it still shows up in my feed.)
I get around the stuck queue problem by watching movies a bit at a time. This avoids devoting a given evening to watch an entire film. I usually watch a third of a movie per day over the course of three days.
It takes a little getting used to, but is second nature to me now. It gives time to gradually digest the movie's content, like reading and reflecting on a novel over the course of a week, rather than in one sitting.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
I think your post is great. I dont entirely agree with some of your points but I can see where you are coming from.
But I don't get your subject? what on earth does it have to do with one legged men with swords and beards and walking the plank?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I'm sorry, but aren't you just posting a Slashdot article summarizing another Slashdot article and its comments?
The real damage being done here is that the apparent capacity of the audience for consuming many titles is increasing. The bottleneck of watching the movie is removed. So now Hollywood can stuff even more worthless crap through the pipeline.
It will get harder to distinguish the worthwhile titles from the crap, and the good movies will fill with product placements, because they're more likely to actually get watched.
--
make install -not war
Wasn't this story posted just yesterday?
I can understand a few days separation (I have the memory of a goldfish, so you can slip them by me), but within 24hrs?
It makes me a sad panda... and you wouldn't like me when I'm sad.
noobcake or noobmuffin? It is the same price...
pay $50 to see it in the theater ($10 for 2 people,
Where do you find Movie tickets for $5 a head these days? Here in Orange County, CA movie tickets start at about $10/head except for Matinees maybe (certainly can't do a movie "night" anyways). Now granted Orange County is one of the most expensive places in the United States to live, but is it that much better elsewhere? Then the movie people probably wonder why I don't go to the movies very much...
...in bed
nullix wrote: "...I can easily rent ... without having to pay $50 to see it in the theater ($10 for 2 people, $20 for food, $20 for a babysitter)."
$10 for 2 tickets? Around here, the dollar theatre costs more than that.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
No comment.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
I'd say that it is not the abundance that is your problem, it is the price.
It is human nature to assign greater value to things that cost the acquirer more. In your case, pirated entertainment is essentially free, so you feel that it is of little worth. While paying your "hard earned money" for something gives it a boost in perceived value.
This phenomenon manifests throughout the human experience, from the mundane to the weird. For example, it has been widely reported that the people who pay full sticker price for their cars tend to be the happiest and have the least number of complaints regardless of make or model.
Another case is fraternity hazing - which on the surface makes absolutely no sense, what kind of idiot wants to be a part of a group that tortured them? Well, it works out that all the hazing is the "price of entrance" to the group and has the long-term effect of making the fraternity members assign an irrationally high value to their membership in the group.
Eight or nine years ago having several hundred Mp3s made a guy the cool kid in town. Now not having several thousand Mp3s makes a guy obsolete.
...)
I got my name, LoudMusic, those eight or nine years ago by having A) A cable modem, and B) 12GB of Mp3s. I guess about three years ago the mission to fill with Mp3s every last byte of disk space I could purchase just became profound insanity. I had plans to build multi-terabyte disk arrays and gather all my friends collections together. Then I realized that 99% of what I already possessed I'd never listened to.
Gluttony.
So now I litterally have no music on my computer. Any of my computers. I use iTunes at work and listen to my coworkers shared libraries. At home I just play video games (old ones at that
The extreme abundance of content is simply overwhelming. Furthermore it's mostly crap and almost impossible to sort through it to find a gem.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"No".
.sig wrong. It goes like this:
By the way, you got your
When immigration is criminalized, only criminals will immigrate.
which of course also explains why you don't see many white-collar workers illegally immigrating.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I have stacks of unwatched *COPIES* of DVDs laying around.
Make sure you also print out labels to replace the bar code at the bottom.
I know exactly where you're coming from. About a year ago, I decided to build the mother of all arcade cabinets. Got a kit and custom built panel from Slikstik, grabbed a decently powerful PC on sale at Fry's, and spent the month or so while I waited for all the parts to arrive tracking down, downloading, and setting up emulators for every home and arcade system ever. Fully built, this thing has ROMs and emulators - all accessible from a simple menu - for literally every Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Atari (all flavors), Arcade (all MAME-supported plus Daphne for laser disc games), Genesis, TurboG16, N64, Gameboy, Super Gameboy, Color Gameboy, Lynx, Colecovision, Jaguar, etc etc etc ever made.... ...and I haven't even turned it on in 8 months. It sits as a giant, 500-pound coffee table next to the front door of my apartment. I skirt around it, guiltily reassuring myself that I'll "play some games tomorrow" nearly every day on my way out the door. It's depressing, and baffling, but there it is.
Oh yeah, you're right. I take it back then: Backslash was never worth a damn.
I never pay more than $6 for a movie, unless it's in one of those really fancy, souped-up Imax theaters, then it's about $7.00. Personally, I'm satisfied with a $3.50 matinee, but even then, most movies suck at even that price.
10 Receive Netflix Disk
20 Copy disk
30 Put disc back in mail
40 GOTO 10
A new feauture called BackSlash.
My GF and I have two queue rules. 1.) No death. 2.) No subtitles. We've found that these are the Netflix movies that sit around the longest. Comedy and action we typically watch within 2-3 days of receipt. We made that rule after "Das Boot" spent a month sitting next to our DVD.
In the case of music, it's not the price for me, it's the physical artifact. I don't perceive a brand-new CD I purchased for $17.99 to be more valuable than the used CD I purchased for $5.99. I do perceive both as being more valuable than a bunch of MP3s encoded at a bitrate that I cannot distinguish from the original.
Of course, that may be because I grew up in the vinyl era, when record albums were often elaborately produced pieces of visual art themselves, and I've just retained that emotional response to the crappy little liner notes in CD cases.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I feel as if this works in the other direction as well. I unplugged my television three-and-a-half years ago and now ANYTHING on a TV is evtertainment. I stayed in a hotel last week and killed some time using the TV, it was AMAZING, even late at night when the programming was craptastic. Also, I can honestly say now after doing this that I like the commercials more than the programming itself.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Since I live about 3/4 mile from a Hollywood Video store, I joined their MVP program, which, for $15/month, lets me check out 3 titles at any one time for up to 5 days. Typically, when I'm feeling a little bored on a summer evening, I'll walk down there with my wife or daughter to pick out some videos. And at least half the time, we'll never watch them. But a few days later, I'll need to walk there again to return them, and maybe get some more.
I get a fair amount of enjoyment from the walk and the browsing through the store, so maybe that's worth the monthly fee.
The problem is not the abundance in itself, it's the hoarding.
Ive gone through the same phase when i was in college. Got an internet connection that was restricted by the local network and the beginning of p2p (scour, napster and some others). Also the beginning of mpeg4 video compression with the divx codec.
The result? I could find lots of movies easily and download them faster than i could watch them. Hell we could almost STREAM them! At first, you go crazy and hoard all you can get your little dirty hands on. Then, when storage space start to get limited, you realize you got gigs of movies, hundreds more that are barely an hour away and you watched a grand total of 4 movies in the past week. What was the point?
This is the same thing to me for people that are on netflix and COPY all the DVDs that come their ways. What is the point? If they want to watch it again, why not cycle it in the queue or buy it if it has that much redeeeming value?
The hoarding is a loss of time when the ressource itself is almost illimited (bandwidth on p2p or movies on netflix). Hoarding more than you can consumme for the remote case you would need it is a waste.
So, coming back to the story here, people have movies waiting on their coffee table. Where is the harm? Either they'll send them back unwatched or they will watch them. If it becomes too frequent, they are just wasting their money on their netflix subscription, but wasting is so usual here. It always takes time to reconsider what you have and what you need. Both dont necessarily match well all the time. If you reconsider too frequently, you are wasting time, a ressource that is getting scarcer by the minute.
I guess I am in the same boat as the people who sit on the movies, though I was a lot worse. I would rent movies from them and sit on them for months before returning it. The same thing happened when I signed up for Blockbuster online. I even had a Gamefly subscription at one point and had the games out for months as well all the while these companies were making nice monthly fees for doing nothing. Same thing with online music stores I have tried such as Napster, Rapsody, Yahoo music. I would log in once a blue moon, listen to a few songs and then not log in for weeks. Now I have cancelled all these subscptions and just buy things I really want.
No need to frantically watch your flood of Netflix DVDs as they come in - just rip 'em, drop them back in the mail, and watch them when you feel like it.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
When I first got netflix it was awesome because I could catch up on legendary movies that I should see for the sake of seeing. After 6 months, it got to the point where I would have something like the original version of The Manchurian Candidate sitting on my dvd player for two weeks. I eventually canceled it, but I just rejoined. Now I'm more selective of the movies in my queue, making sure that I am actually going to watch the movie promptly when it arrives in my mail box so I can get the most out of the service.
But I will rip a movie to my NAS and watch it later. This way I get about 12 movies a month. I delete them after I watch them. This is just one way to queue up some stuff. A lot of the movies I dont watch, even though I ripped them, so I even have a script to delete anything older than 3 months. By having them ripped, I sometimes can watch them on my ipod or laptop while commuting.
Intelligent Design
Anyone else think their website sucks?
I mean it looks nice, and I like the way the movie info pops up, but I can't ever see new releases that just came out, in the new release area at all.
I cant figure out anyway to actually show the new releases by relase date.
Like I know a movie that just came out and see it on TV as just being released on DVD but when I go to new releases it dont show, but if I search for it , it is there.
For instance "The Libertine" just came out and I can't find it listed under new releases at all.
But if I search its there.
And the list it gives you when you first login "Other Movies You Might Enjoy" ic consistantly fucked up.
It lists the worst movies as 4+ stars all the time.
I somtimes go to blockbuster.com looks and see what movies are just out, then go search them on netflix.
FOr a 1billion dollar company to have a site that offers so little choice in search (you get a text box and click search) you would think you could search by release date etc!
WTF?
just a thought.
I'd like to see a movie theater where the tickets are $20 each. But you get to sit in a nice, comfortable recliner, without having to play "Elbow Wars" for the armrest, get kicked in the back by someone, or have to smell the breath of the person next to you. Shoot, make it $25, and have someone come around and refill your popcorn for you. I'll pay.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
This phenomena is similar to libraries that have "no late fees". Most have found that the books lay around the house for months where libraries with even the smallest fines (even $.05 per day) get returned promptly. Go figure...
I have often thought about this, and I believe it is just a sign of our abundance of wealth in this country.
Here's a prime example of what's being talked about here...
When I was a teenager, I bought an Atari Lynx (birthday present for myself) with my hard earned after-tax dollars. I only made minimum wage at the time so it was a pretty sizeable investment for me. I bought one game for it: STUN Runner. I played the heck out of that game. I bought a couple more at full price (about $40 each) and played the heck out of those as well. I had the system in total for about a year with only the three games, played it regularly and for lengthy periods, say an hour at a time. Then Atari canceled the system and all the KayBee stores clearanced them off for $2-5 each. My family went on a road trip when this happened, so in every major town we stopped in we would stop by the local mall, and I would snag the games I didn't already have. I ended up with 25 games by the end of the trip. After that when I got stuck at one game after about 3-10 minutes, I would simply pop that one out, and switch to the next. Rinse, repeat.
The same thing is true with my girlfriend's iPod today. We took a road trip and she could barely be bothered to finish a whole song before skipping to the next. As someone not in control of the iPod, this is rather irritating. Not to say that I don't do this myself in the car, but my CD collection is a lot smaller, and I've got a 6 disc changer, so there's less "reward" in skipping around.
Sometimes it really isn't good to have everything you want right now. That's probably why ADD is so prevalent today. We aren't forced to focus anymore.