Netflix first impressions

Last week the Geekette and I signed up for Netflix. For anyone not familiar with this service (which should be few and far between among those who are online) it provides, for a monthly fee, a mail-order DVD movie rental service. You choose which movies you want on their website and they send them to you in the mail. You can have up to three movies checked out at a time and you can keep a movie for as long as you want. Wal-Mart has a similar service (priced about 30 cents less per month for three movies, or a few bucks less for two) but I decided to go with Netflix for the following reasons:

• Netflix is the originator of this business model so they have the most experience.


• Since they've been at it longest, their recommendation engine's database has the most data and will produce more suitable results.


• Although I haven't heard one way or the other there's a chance that Wal-Mart may have "special" Wal-Mart exclusive versions of some movies which have been altered. They've been known to do this with music CD's.

As for the home theater system, it consists of a Hitachi 50" projection TV, a Panasonic DVD player with support for Dolby Digital and Sony DTS, and a Pioneer digital decoder/amplifier that also supports DD and DTS running Acoustic Research speakers and a 10" powered subwoofer. It's certainly not state of the art but it works well, it sounds great, and the screen is plenty large enough that I'm not yet desperate to get an HD television.

I signed up and queued up a few movies. The next day, I received emails indicating that all three movies were on their way. The day after that, they all arrived in the mail. Netflix maintains several distribution centers around the country and the one that services my area is close enough that it takes only a day to get there.

The DVD's arrive in sleeves (which appear to be made of Tyvek or a similar material) which are enclosed in specially-designed envelopes. The envelope is also used to return the DVD's and the postage is prepaid. All you do is put it back, seal it, and drop it in the mailbox.

As a contrast to the fast service, however, the first movie I watched demonstrated one downside to this service. During a short section of the film, about a minute or two in length, the DVD would not play correctly on the player. Frames would freeze and would often be corrupted which is the hallmark of the player's inability to read the data accurately. The disc itself was noticeably scratched up with most of the scratches being of the fine type that comes with much use. Cleaning it didn't help but, fortunately, the section was short and the rest of the movie played fine.

Netflix knows that this is a potential issue so they include on the DVD sleeve a couple of checkboxes that you can mark if you encounter problems. You can tell them if the DVD was unplayable, if it was the wrong DVD, and whether or not you wish a replacement DVD of the same movie sent to you. As this movie wasn't actually unplayable, I didn't check any of the boxes. In the future, though, I probably will check the unplayable box if I encounter this type of problem. The second movie I watched did not have any problems at all even though it also had a considerable amount of fine scratches.

So far I've watched two of the three movies I initially received. I'll probably watch the third before the end of this coming weekend. The first two have been sent back and emails arrived the next day indicating that they had arrived. The next movie in my queue was sent that day, and the one after that was sent the following day.

So far I'm pretty well satisfied with the service. The nice thing is that I can now go back and watch some movies I want to see again, or that I missed in the theaters, but didn't want to rent or buy. If a movie sucks, I just send it back and get another one. One clear positive feature, which is one of the big selling points, is that I can keep a movie for as long as I want if I want to watch it multiple times.

Conclusion: I wish I had done this sooner as I'm finally going to get to watch some of the movies I've been wanting to see for some time. I don't really have any excuse not to as I no longer have to rent each one separately. It's a cool service and, at 18 bucks a month it's a lot cheaper than renting the same number of movies as I'll likely be watching, it's definitely cheaper than watching movies in the theater when I don't particularly care where I see them, and it's way cheaper than dealing with late fees. If you like movies, and especially if you spend more than 18 bucks a month on movie rentals, it's recommended.