First off, I love forgetting to hit that preview button before posting. Made my post look so nice, it did.
Anywho... a disclaimer before this reply: I do not work for Netflix, and as such, I have no access to the numbers they use to determine anything. What follows is pure speculation, based on personal experience and reports from friends.
You didn't say which plan you're on, but I'm thinking that the three-out plan is a safe assumption based on what you've said. While I entirely agree with your last paragraph, I think that 6-per-week on the three-out plan is a bit unrealistic to expect for any length of time. I'm not saying that you're pirating them if you're getting / wanting that many, but on the three-out plan, you're likely getting close to being an expense to them instead of a profit. It all goes back to that unlimited thing; they really do need to remove that, as I can see your point on that matter.
I don't think that the amount of items in your queue is relevant to their formulas. I've had close to the 500 limit in mine almost since I started (my queue) and as far as I can tell, it was never a factor for me.
If the 2-3 days to ship is the norm for you, then yes, you're definitely being throttled. If they're constantly sending from across the country, then again, I agree with you that that is pretty shitty. It's happened to me a few times (not enough to bitch about, personally), but it's always been with obscure indie titles and such. It's reasonable to expect that they'd have more copies of, say, LOTR sitting around than copies of <obscure indie title>, which would explain shipping it from a distant warehouse that happens to have it at the time.
Again, most of this post is speculation. I don't know their formulas, I don't know how many movies you've been getting, and I don't know if you're getting Hollywood blockbusters or indie titles. Also, again, I agree with your last paragraph... if they'd do away with that silly "Unlimited" word, then all would be good. Just wanted to throw in my personal two cents, since it seemed that all of the comments came from those with negative experiences as of this morning when I replied.
Maybe it's just me, but I've had nothing but good things to say about Netflix since I signed up back in May of 2004. For $18 per month (3 at a time plan), I've always got something to watch sitting on my desk. Granted, I don't go through all three movies per day, but I do get three or four movies per week for the price of one rental ($4.50). The speed has always been great; I can send back a movie on Monday, have them receive it on Tuesday and send out the next one on my list, and have that new disc on my desk by Wednesday.
Would I get throttled if I were to receive three discs on Monday, rip them, send them all back on Tuesday, and repeat that process for a few weeks? Probably. But I'd have a whole lot of ripped discs to watch while I waited for the new ones.
Thanks to the recent "revelations" from PA, I'm starting to feel like quite the shill with this post. So, to sum it up: yes, they probably should get rid of those "Unlimited!" offers, but if you just want to watch a movie every other night or so, you can not beat Netflix.
I haven't tried BBClone in... eh, six months, I'd say. If they've improved, good for them. However, it crashed routinely when I tried it. Everything would work fine for a while, peak hours would roll around (100-150 users online), and then it would die and take Apache down with it. Restart Apache, BBClone works again, but its logs are corrupt and unreadable.
I'm guessing it was the massive amounts of writing to txt files required by the script that screwed things up on my end, so it may be useful if you run a low-traffic site. I liked the look and features of the script, but there was that one minor "killing the server" thing...
Whoopsie... that's what I get for skimming, I suppose. In that case, he probably bought the Xbox, had seconds thoughts but still paid (hence "I'll pay you tomorrow"), then changed his mind and said "don't send it to me" to avoid any sort of fraud suit against himself. Then, with the "all sales are final" tag in the auction, he used the fraud thing to get his cash back.
Sorry, probably stating the obvious there, but felt a bit silly about missing the post up above, heh.
1. I buy your widget for $X.
2. I send you the cash through PayPal.
3. You ship me the widget.
4. I claim you never sent it and file a fraud charge against you.
5. I now have your widget as well as my $X.
Walk ten miles down that road, and you'll cross five bridges. I built them all. But do they call me MMMDI the bridge-builder? No! I forged half the horseshoes in this village, but do they call me MMMDI the smith? Of course not! If it weren't for me, there'd be no rooves on any of these houses! MMMDI the tiler? Of course not!
I can't answer for Disney or Sony, but I get a good deal of screener DVDs for review purposes. I get about 10-12 per month from the many labels of EI Cinema (Seduction Cinema, Shock-O-Rama, Video Outlaw, etc.), as well as 2-3 here and there from Lions Gate.
With those companies as the basis for my statements, the screeners for direct-to-video films and about-to-hit-DVD films are fully-featured with all of the bonus materials and menus that you'd get if you purchased the DVD. Some things may change when the DVD hits stores (bonus features added, changed menus, things of that nature), but generally, they're the same thing you'd purchase from your retailer of choice.
Screener copies of movies that are currently in theaters or are about to hit theaters are bare-bones. You get the typical piracy warning before jumping to a very simple menu (with nothing more than "Play Movie" as an option), or it goes straight from the warning into the movie.
Why do you (or anyone you know) put ads on your page?
I use Google ads on mysites. I also use Amazon's webservices on album pages. Why? It's quite simple. The hosting bill is $90 / month, and I'd rather not have to pay that out of pocket.
On a good month, I make enough from ads to cover the bills and buy a CD or two. On a bad month, I make enough so that I only have to pay around ten bucks out of pocket for the hosting.
As far as annoying / flashing / flash / click the monkey ads go, I never have and never will use them. Making cash from the site to pay the bills is nice, but I would rather shut the sites down than be just another site overloaded with that crap.
I'm going to assume that the original poster meant the $17.99 3-out plan (there is no $19.99 plan, unless it's some promo thing that isn't showing up for registered users).
Anywho, there is no way you could get 40-50 movies per month on this plan, and it would be pushing it to get this many on the $47.99 / 8-out plan. I have a distribution center just a few miles away from my house, and as a result, I receive movies the day after they're shipped out. When I was on the 3-out plan (recently moved to 4-out), I only managed 14 movies per month *tops*... and I was watching / sending back the movies on the day that I received them.
The problem (that I have, anyway) is that I receive the movies on the day after they're shipped... but it takes them 3-5 days to receive the movies once they're shipped back, check them in, and get around to shipping the next title.
Netflix is a great service, don't get me wrong... but there's no way you could manage that many movies on one of the cheap-o plans. I'm not even going to get into the throttling factor...
Then again, there's always a small minority of users who will blame the webmaster instead of the browser for their lousy web experience.
Amen. My newest project (shameless plug) is still small in terms of popularity, but I receive numerous "why does this look weird / not work in IE" messages regardless. Trying to explain to people that the site is standards compliant and that IE doesn't properly support standards is somewhere in the range of explaining the laws of physics in terms of how much people grasp the concept.
According to the stats for this month, 14.7% of viewers are still using Windows 2000 or lower. That number was 16.2% last month, but I'm sure the small drop is thanks to only four days worth of data being in the system for this month. Combine this with 75.3% of viewers using IE (0.5% using IE 3.0!), and I can only imagine the feedback I'll be receiving when the site grows in popularity.
Disclaimer: the site is standards compliant unless you check out a review where one of us has used an & symbol in the review text. MySQL character encoding, been busy, need to fix it, blah blah blah.
My site is fairly popular, bringing in 5,000-6,000 uniques daily. The percentage of FF users continues to grow on here, and it's gone up a bit every month since October.
Stats thus far this month (top ten only - browser, hits, percentage):
MS Internet Explorer 2079395 78.5 %
Firefox 379445 14.3 %
Unknown 79904 3 %
Opera 29449 1.1 %
Mozilla 26880 1 %
Netscape 25841 0.9 %
Safari 23546 0.8 %
Konqueror 1023 0 %
Phoenix 502 0 %
Firebird (Old Firefox) 488 0 %
Stats per browser since it was brought up in another post (top five only):
My site is nowhere near the league of Google, but it is fairly successful (6,000-7,000 daily uniques). My site is far from tech-related, but I've still seen the number of Firefox users raise every month since I started keeping logs (instead of wiping them and starting over... ugh, what was I thinking).
April 2005 all versions lumped together, only the top five browsers shown - browser, total unique hits, total percent MS Internet Explorer 4,581,456 77.1 %
Firefox 838,899 14.1 %
Unknown 241,971 4 %
Opera 75,765 1.2 %
Netscape 70,894 1.1 %
March 2005 These results are slightly skewed; I lost half of the months stats during an upgrade. MS Internet Explorer 2,331,100 78.1 %
Firefox 388,137 13 %
Unknown 117,335 3.9 %
Netscape 42,076 1.4 %
Opera 38,898 1.3 %
February 2005 MS Internet Explorer 4,499,062 76.8 %
Firefox 721,040 12.3 %
Unknown 300,680 5.1 %
Netscape 95,987 1.6 %
Opera 85,953 1.4 %
January 2005 MS Internet Explorer 5,461,478 79.8 %
Firefox 716,106 10.4 %
Unknown 269,946 3.9 %
Opera 108,339 1.5 %
Mozilla 101,918 1.4 %
December 2004 MS Internet Explorer 5,804,579 80.7 %
Firefox 682,022 9.4 %
Unknown 314,979 4.3 %
Opera 102,336 1.4 %
Netscape 101,781 1.4 %
I have nothing against the "rap, hiphop" ilk (I have a personal problem calling it music).
MTV Rap? Totally agreed.
However, not all rap is "bling bling" and crotch-grabbing. I could list off a couple hundred ones to back up my point, but I'll settle for just one - Del The Funky Homosapien. If lyrics such as these don't appeal to the gamer nerds, I don't quite know what would.
What if a character on TV says something about "changing channels" or "turn it up" or "turn it off" or... if the TV intercepted those commands, that would make for one hell of a viewing experience.
Now factor in if the stereo / DVD player / other electronics also responded to voice commands. That'd be one amusing scene, in my view.
Considering that the CD from my example has been out of print for about four years now, purchasing it new and supporting them really wasn't an option.
The restrictions I refer to are lossless quality (we agree there, so no need to beat that horse) and portability. If I buy a song through iTunes, can I listen to it on my main computer, my gaming computer, and in my stereo (burnt as data, not CD)? Let's say for the point of argument that this is allowed... what if they change their minds later on? I'm stuck with $XX worth of songs that are now useless to me thanks to their DRM scheme. If, {DEITY} forbid, iTunes shuts down tomorrow, would I still be able to listen to these tracks that I purchased from them? Basically, if I purchase music either in physical or digital form, I want to be able to listen to it in the way that I choose.
Granted, I've never used iTunes and I'm going solely on what I've read, so I could be wrong on those... it wouldn't be the first time. Also, OGG works on every major player (WinAMP, Foobar, Windows Media Player with the proper plugin, etc), so I'm definitely not limited in that way. Does it work on portable music players such as an iPod? I have no idea, and I don't care... I have no interest in them.
Agreed. Unless you're buying the new Britney Spears CD, you can find just about anything cheaper in the used section of Amazon or on eBay. Case in point, I recently heard a track that I really enjoyed (Baby Namboos, check them out if you like trip-hop). I could have purchased that one track from iTunes for a buck, in lossless quality and with all sorts of restrictions on it... instead, I purchased the CD for sixteen cents on Amazon, and then ripped it to high quality OGG files.
I'd gladly pay a bit more for the convenience of skipping the shipping / ripping process, but since that's not an option as of now, I'll stick to used CD purchases and pirating stuff that I can't find at a reasonable price.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I love forgetting to hit that preview button before posting. Made my post look so nice, it did.
Anywho... a disclaimer before this reply: I do not work for Netflix, and as such, I have no access to the numbers they use to determine anything. What follows is pure speculation, based on personal experience and reports from friends.
You didn't say which plan you're on, but I'm thinking that the three-out plan is a safe assumption based on what you've said. While I entirely agree with your last paragraph, I think that 6-per-week on the three-out plan is a bit unrealistic to expect for any length of time. I'm not saying that you're pirating them if you're getting / wanting that many, but on the three-out plan, you're likely getting close to being an expense to them instead of a profit. It all goes back to that unlimited thing; they really do need to remove that, as I can see your point on that matter.
I don't think that the amount of items in your queue is relevant to their formulas. I've had close to the 500 limit in mine almost since I started (my queue) and as far as I can tell, it was never a factor for me.
If the 2-3 days to ship is the norm for you, then yes, you're definitely being throttled. If they're constantly sending from across the country, then again, I agree with you that that is pretty shitty. It's happened to me a few times (not enough to bitch about, personally), but it's always been with obscure indie titles and such. It's reasonable to expect that they'd have more copies of, say, LOTR sitting around than copies of <obscure indie title>, which would explain shipping it from a distant warehouse that happens to have it at the time.
Again, most of this post is speculation. I don't know their formulas, I don't know how many movies you've been getting, and I don't know if you're getting Hollywood blockbusters or indie titles. Also, again, I agree with your last paragraph... if they'd do away with that silly "Unlimited" word, then all would be good. Just wanted to throw in my personal two cents, since it seemed that all of the comments came from those with negative experiences as of this morning when I replied.
Maybe it's just me, but I've had nothing but good things to say about Netflix since I signed up back in May of 2004. For $18 per month (3 at a time plan), I've always got something to watch sitting on my desk. Granted, I don't go through all three movies per day, but I do get three or four movies per week for the price of one rental ($4.50). The speed has always been great; I can send back a movie on Monday, have them receive it on Tuesday and send out the next one on my list, and have that new disc on my desk by Wednesday. Would I get throttled if I were to receive three discs on Monday, rip them, send them all back on Tuesday, and repeat that process for a few weeks? Probably. But I'd have a whole lot of ripped discs to watch while I waited for the new ones. Thanks to the recent "revelations" from PA, I'm starting to feel like quite the shill with this post. So, to sum it up: yes, they probably should get rid of those "Unlimited!" offers, but if you just want to watch a movie every other night or so, you can not beat Netflix.
I haven't tried BBClone in... eh, six months, I'd say. If they've improved, good for them. However, it crashed routinely when I tried it. Everything would work fine for a while, peak hours would roll around (100-150 users online), and then it would die and take Apache down with it. Restart Apache, BBClone works again, but its logs are corrupt and unreadable.
I'm guessing it was the massive amounts of writing to txt files required by the script that screwed things up on my end, so it may be useful if you run a low-traffic site. I liked the look and features of the script, but there was that one minor "killing the server" thing...
I'm staying out of this debate, but...
It attaches footer to every outgoing email.
That option is on by default, but you can turn it off with E-mail Scanner > Properties > Configure > "Certify Mail".
Whoopsie... that's what I get for skimming, I suppose. In that case, he probably bought the Xbox, had seconds thoughts but still paid (hence "I'll pay you tomorrow"), then changed his mind and said "don't send it to me" to avoid any sort of fraud suit against himself. Then, with the "all sales are final" tag in the auction, he used the fraud thing to get his cash back.
Sorry, probably stating the obvious there, but felt a bit silly about missing the post up above, heh.
Check out Toolhaus. I always use that when making any sort of large purchase and have found that it's pretty helpful.
1. I buy your widget for $X.
2. I send you the cash through PayPal.
3. You ship me the widget.
4. I claim you never sent it and file a fraud charge against you.
5. I now have your widget as well as my $X.
Walk ten miles down that road, and you'll cross five bridges. I built them all. But do they call me MMMDI the bridge-builder? No! I forged half the horseshoes in this village, but do they call me MMMDI the smith? Of course not! If it weren't for me, there'd be no rooves on any of these houses! MMMDI the tiler? Of course not!
But you fuck one sheep...
I can't answer for Disney or Sony, but I get a good deal of screener DVDs for review purposes. I get about 10-12 per month from the many labels of EI Cinema (Seduction Cinema, Shock-O-Rama, Video Outlaw, etc.), as well as 2-3 here and there from Lions Gate.
With those companies as the basis for my statements, the screeners for direct-to-video films and about-to-hit-DVD films are fully-featured with all of the bonus materials and menus that you'd get if you purchased the DVD. Some things may change when the DVD hits stores (bonus features added, changed menus, things of that nature), but generally, they're the same thing you'd purchase from your retailer of choice.
Screener copies of movies that are currently in theaters or are about to hit theaters are bare-bones. You get the typical piracy warning before jumping to a very simple menu (with nothing more than "Play Movie" as an option), or it goes straight from the warning into the movie.
Why do you (or anyone you know) put ads on your page?
I use Google ads on my sites. I also use Amazon's webservices on album pages. Why? It's quite simple. The hosting bill is $90 / month, and I'd rather not have to pay that out of pocket.
On a good month, I make enough from ads to cover the bills and buy a CD or two. On a bad month, I make enough so that I only have to pay around ten bucks out of pocket for the hosting.
As far as annoying / flashing / flash / click the monkey ads go, I never have and never will use them. Making cash from the site to pay the bills is nice, but I would rather shut the sites down than be just another site overloaded with that crap.
I'm going to assume that the original poster meant the $17.99 3-out plan (there is no $19.99 plan, unless it's some promo thing that isn't showing up for registered users).
Anywho, there is no way you could get 40-50 movies per month on this plan, and it would be pushing it to get this many on the $47.99 / 8-out plan. I have a distribution center just a few miles away from my house, and as a result, I receive movies the day after they're shipped out. When I was on the 3-out plan (recently moved to 4-out), I only managed 14 movies per month *tops*... and I was watching / sending back the movies on the day that I received them.
The problem (that I have, anyway) is that I receive the movies on the day after they're shipped... but it takes them 3-5 days to receive the movies once they're shipped back, check them in, and get around to shipping the next title.
Netflix is a great service, don't get me wrong... but there's no way you could manage that many movies on one of the cheap-o plans. I'm not even going to get into the throttling factor...
I've picked up a few decent ones that I haven't seen mentioned yet.
The Severed Arm (1973) - Decent is the best word here, but worth the buck.
Swamp Women (1955) - Cheesy, very cheesy... but strangely entertaining.
A peice of plastic with a pump attached to it. [snip] It sucked. Sounds like it did its job, eh?
Then again, there's always a small minority of users who will blame the webmaster instead of the browser for their lousy web experience.
Amen. My newest project (shameless plug) is still small in terms of popularity, but I receive numerous "why does this look weird / not work in IE" messages regardless. Trying to explain to people that the site is standards compliant and that IE doesn't properly support standards is somewhere in the range of explaining the laws of physics in terms of how much people grasp the concept.
According to the stats for this month, 14.7% of viewers are still using Windows 2000 or lower. That number was 16.2% last month, but I'm sure the small drop is thanks to only four days worth of data being in the system for this month. Combine this with 75.3% of viewers using IE (0.5% using IE 3.0!), and I can only imagine the feedback I'll be receiving when the site grows in popularity.
Disclaimer: the site is standards compliant unless you check out a review where one of us has used an & symbol in the review text. MySQL character encoding, been busy, need to fix it, blah blah blah.
$5.99 Keyboard (Score:4, Interesting)
...accidental sperm from unexpected ejaculation...
/me slowly backs away
My site is fairly popular, bringing in 5,000-6,000 uniques daily. The percentage of FF users continues to grow on here, and it's gone up a bit every month since October.
Stats thus far this month (top ten only - browser, hits, percentage):
MS Internet Explorer 2079395 78.5 %
Firefox 379445 14.3 %
Unknown 79904 3 %
Opera 29449 1.1 %
Mozilla 26880 1 %
Netscape 25841 0.9 %
Safari 23546 0.8 %
Konqueror 1023 0 %
Phoenix 502 0 %
Firebird (Old Firefox) 488 0 %
Stats per browser since it was brought up in another post (top five only):
Msie 6.0 2020020 76.3 %
Msie 5.5 25094 0.9 %
Msie 5.23 6121 0.2 %
Msie 5.22 2922 0.1 %
Msie 5.21 192 0 %
Firefox 1.0.4 3671 0.1 %
Firefox 1.0.3 180543 6.8 %
Firefox 1.0.2 56023 2.1 %
Firefox 1.0.1 30442 1.1 %
Firefox 1.0 73662 2.7 %
Netscape 7.2 16720 0.6 %
Netscape 7.1 6691 0.2 %
Netscape 7.02 694 0 %
Netscape 7.01 75 0 %
Netscape 7.0 839 0 %
Unknown 79904 3 %
Opera 29449 1.1 %
Mozilla 26880 1 %
Safari 23546 0.8 %
Konqueror 1023 0 %
New Zealand... kids... sheep...
Must not insert joke. Must not insert joke. Must not insert joke.
My site is nowhere near the league of Google, but it is fairly successful (6,000-7,000 daily uniques). My site is far from tech-related, but I've still seen the number of Firefox users raise every month since I started keeping logs (instead of wiping them and starting over... ugh, what was I thinking).
April 2005
all versions lumped together, only the top five browsers shown - browser, total unique hits, total percent
MS Internet Explorer 4,581,456 77.1 %
Firefox 838,899 14.1 %
Unknown 241,971 4 %
Opera 75,765 1.2 %
Netscape 70,894 1.1 %
March 2005
These results are slightly skewed; I lost half of the months stats during an upgrade.
MS Internet Explorer 2,331,100 78.1 %
Firefox 388,137 13 %
Unknown 117,335 3.9 %
Netscape 42,076 1.4 %
Opera 38,898 1.3 %
February 2005
MS Internet Explorer 4,499,062 76.8 %
Firefox 721,040 12.3 %
Unknown 300,680 5.1 %
Netscape 95,987 1.6 %
Opera 85,953 1.4 %
January 2005
MS Internet Explorer 5,461,478 79.8 %
Firefox 716,106 10.4 %
Unknown 269,946 3.9 %
Opera 108,339 1.5 %
Mozilla 101,918 1.4 %
December 2004
MS Internet Explorer 5,804,579 80.7 %
Firefox 682,022 9.4 %
Unknown 314,979 4.3 %
Opera 102,336 1.4 %
Netscape 101,781 1.4 %
Ninety-five cents per person per dinner? Holy hell, and I thought my local $5 (per person) Chinese Buffet was great.
I have nothing against the "rap, hiphop" ilk (I have a personal problem calling it music).
MTV Rap? Totally agreed.
However, not all rap is "bling bling" and crotch-grabbing. I could list off a couple hundred ones to back up my point, but I'll settle for just one - Del The Funky Homosapien. If lyrics such as these don't appeal to the gamer nerds, I don't quite know what would.
What if a character on TV says something about "changing channels" or "turn it up" or "turn it off" or... if the TV intercepted those commands, that would make for one hell of a viewing experience.
Now factor in if the stereo / DVD player / other electronics also responded to voice commands. That'd be one amusing scene, in my view.
My review buddy actually gave that movie a watch. Check out his thoughts if you're interested.
Will there be smart buildings in a bag?
Considering that the CD from my example has been out of print for about four years now, purchasing it new and supporting them really wasn't an option.
The restrictions I refer to are lossless quality (we agree there, so no need to beat that horse) and portability. If I buy a song through iTunes, can I listen to it on my main computer, my gaming computer, and in my stereo (burnt as data, not CD)? Let's say for the point of argument that this is allowed... what if they change their minds later on? I'm stuck with $XX worth of songs that are now useless to me thanks to their DRM scheme. If, {DEITY} forbid, iTunes shuts down tomorrow, would I still be able to listen to these tracks that I purchased from them? Basically, if I purchase music either in physical or digital form, I want to be able to listen to it in the way that I choose.
Granted, I've never used iTunes and I'm going solely on what I've read, so I could be wrong on those... it wouldn't be the first time. Also, OGG works on every major player (WinAMP, Foobar, Windows Media Player with the proper plugin, etc), so I'm definitely not limited in that way. Does it work on portable music players such as an iPod? I have no idea, and I don't care... I have no interest in them.
Agreed. Unless you're buying the new Britney Spears CD, you can find just about anything cheaper in the used section of Amazon or on eBay. Case in point, I recently heard a track that I really enjoyed (Baby Namboos, check them out if you like trip-hop). I could have purchased that one track from iTunes for a buck, in lossless quality and with all sorts of restrictions on it... instead, I purchased the CD for sixteen cents on Amazon, and then ripped it to high quality OGG files.
I'd gladly pay a bit more for the convenience of skipping the shipping / ripping process, but since that's not an option as of now, I'll stick to used CD purchases and pirating stuff that I can't find at a reasonable price.