Netflix again

Back in 2003, we dropped cable TV in order to save money when I was unemployed. When my employment became stable again, I decided against monopolistic and customer-unfriendly Comcast and signed up with DirecTV. Part of the package included a dual-tuner Tivo with which I immediately fell in love. It didn’t take long before I had used up the 50 hours of available space and started to feel the pressure to watch my shows before they disappeared. As a result we dropped our Netflix subscription since we were watching Tivo all the time and never had time for DVDs.

2009 has brought the advent of the HD age to our household and things are changing in our content consumption. Before I purchased our new LCD TV at Costco, I promised myself that I would not spend a bunch of money after to make all our content HD. In fact, the main reason we got the TV was because of the Xbox. The impending HD switch-over was a consideration but not a big one because DirecTV provides our television content and they will continue to provide the same service for some time.

Still, the whole family is very HD curious and we longed for more HD content. Friends advised me that Netflix offers on-demand HD content and yesterday I revisited their website to see how much a membership cost and how the on-demand thing worked. When we left Netflix, the minimum membership was $19/month and gave you 3 DVDs at a time. Now Netflix has a $5/month plan that gives you 1 DVD at a time. However, if you get the $9/month plan, you get 1 DVD and unlimited on-demand viewing. That means we can watch as many movies as we want on the Xbox and they will be delivered at higher than DVD quality. Because we had to relocate the Xbox in order to connect it to the new TV, it’s no longer near a network connection. Thus, I need to buy an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from it’s old location to the new location (about 10 feet) before we can try out the Netflix on-demand feature.

While we’ve been gone, Netflix has really improved their service and added many features. One of these is the ability to share your ratings, queue and other information with friends. Because I’m “new” to the Netflix, I have no friends. If you’re on Netflix, please be my friend.