Think I might. Am down to just the 1 DVD plan but the 1 DVD I get sits around for like a month because I forget to watch it or forget to send it back, while in the meantime I’m watching a ton of stuff VOD and have so much in the instant queue that getting the discs isn’t really even worth the extra buck or two anymore.
In Canada, the only choice we get is Netflix streaming. No DVD option available at all.
Also, the content selection looks to be about 1/10 of what Americans get, yet the price is the same.
Two or three times already I’ve wanted to watch a movie or program, and decided to try Netflix and if they had it I’d sign up. So far, they haven’t had a single thing I wanted to watch.
So, NO. At least not until they get out from under our stupid Canadian Content regulations or whatever else it is that’s preventing them from giving Canadians something we might actually want to watch.
I’d never checked out Vudu before. Renting or buying on a per-title basis is not interesting when you can stream all you want from Netflix for $8 per month.
I think I’m going to give up on Netflix.
While their streaming content library has only improved, I feel like the quality’s gone downhill. I think that might be because more of my neighbors are streaming video on demand and that’s the way the cable internet connection crumbles.
Netflix could fix this if they’d just allow me to designate part of my hard drive for cache space and download some high quality video in the background, but they haven’t for whatever reason. I was right on the fence about Netflix before this, so telling me I need to pay more money for my current plan kicked me over the edge.
If you have a cable modem and it is more than 3 or 4 years old, get a new one from your cable company. The standard they use is called DOCSIS. They went from version 2 to 3 about 5 years ago and version 3 is supposed to be much better.
As for netflix, if you have a Roku player (or googletv, appletv,etc), check out Hulu Plus. They might have enough of the broadcast stuff to keep you happy.
I have the three disc with Blu Ray and it is going from $20.99 to $23.99. I won’t mind the increase if they finally get subtitles on their streaming content. I have a slight hearing loss and anything with lots of background noise (action movies) or heavy accents I have trouble understanding without the subtitles.
I hear that. And what’s up with the audio on streamed movies from Netflix? You can barely hear the dialogue even with the computer volume turned on high. I know I’m not the only one with this problem either…
Like many others here, I also watch a lot of streaming (on my Roku) and often have a mailed disk just sitting around for a while. Although usually I rip the disk to my hard drive and send it back, but the ripped movies are piling up.
I don’t think I’ll go to only streaming just yet, but I see it as a likely thing at some point.
Unfortunately not – a lot of streamed content still doesn’t have closed captioning or subs.
If you have a TV that has a HDMI port and a laptop, you can use a HDMI cable to stream it from your computer to the TV. That’s what I’ve done since the death of my 9 year old DVD player and so far it seems to have worked well.
I still don’t have a device that I can use to receive Netflix streaming. I just can’t make a decision about which one to get and actually spend the money to buy it. So it’s still just the mailed DVDs for me.
Aren’t you posting on a computer?:dubious:
I stream to my computer.
I’ve already gone from 3 at a time to 2. I might go from 2 to 1 movie at a time, but it is hard to go streaming only, since the DVD library at Netflix is so deep. IIRC the DVD library is around 100,000 titles and the streaming is around 20,000. I actually live in walking distance of a RedBox so it is a good option for big releases and I only have to use it a couple of times a month. Redbox is a bad option if you are the kind of person that lets a DVD lay around, since it $1 a day.
There is an interesting article in the NY Times today about Netflix:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/business/25netflix.html?ref=technology&pagewanted=all
Interesting factoids:
[ol]
[li]Netflix payed a billion dollars for streaming rights from Parmount, MGM and Lionsgate.[/li][li]Netflix will spend 1/2 a billion this year on postage.[/li][li]Netflix is only paying 15 cents a subscriber per month for streaming access to Starz.[/li][li]Netflix accounted for more than 20 percent of all Internet download traffic in North America in peak evening hours.[/li][/ol]
The bottom line is that Netflix doesn’t have serious competition right now, but the content providers and cable companies aren’t happy and plan to give Netflix serious competition and make them pay a lot more for content.
Naw. I figure it will be like cable. Once enough people were willing to pay extra for cable becasue you got more choice and no commercials, they introduced commercials to all the basic cable channels and moved all the good stuff to Premium cable at a much higher price. Once enough people are on streaming only the commercials you can’t get past will be introduced and you’ll have to pay higher prices to avoid them.
I don’t spend enough time in front of the screen to make it worth it and I don’t want to spend more. I’m irked but not surprised that the monthly rates went up - it was only a matter of time once most of the big rental chains went out of business.
and
These issues are, i think, going to become more of a problem for Netflix and its subscribers.
As more and more people switch to streaming only, especially the high-bandwidth HD movies that are becoming available, it’s not only going to degrade internet speed for some people, but internet service providers are going to get more and more serious about setting monthly usage caps.
There was a time when using 150-250GB a month seemed to me to be almost impossible, but if you watch a lot of Netflix and are a high-volume user for other things like online gaming, MLB.com, YouTube, porn, Hulu, whatever, then you can easily get into that range.
As this Salon article notes, there’s a good chance that heavy Netflix users will soon end up paying for the data they are using to stream all those movies, effectively wiping out the savings of the streaming-only plan.
And all this doesn’t even take into account, as other have noted, that there are thousands of great movies and shows not available for streaming. My current queue contains about 200 movies and shows, and only about 15 percent of those can be streamed.
I can’t watch a full-length movie on my computer. First it’s not in a location where I can sit comfortably and watch, and second, it’s not in a place where two people can see the screen, and probably I’d want my wife to watch with me.
I’m staying at 3 movies but I’m dropping my BluRay. I’ve got one but my set is only 720p and does a great job of up converting regular DVDs. No point in paying the extra money if I can rarely see the difference.
I did. I’ve been on the streaming + dvd plan for a while, and never once ordered a dvd. I watch streaming on my Xbox. I love the old shows. I watched then entire series of Rockford files, and Adam 12.
Fun game when your bored. pause adam 12 when they get to an interesction on a call, then feed that cross street into google street view and see how many of the buildings in LA are still there. (the adresses they give in the audio are fake, so you have to look for signs).
Yes, I get that bored.
Plus, there’s a ton of MST3k.
I’ve had a disc sitting here on the table for over a month, so I think I’m going to switch. I watch the streaming all the time on my phone when I have downtime at work. I love that it just picks up where you left off, so I can end the application if a customer or phone call comes in.
I just dropped from the 3 discs plan to 2.
Of the 170 titles in my queue, only one is available to stream, so streaming-only is a complete impossibility.
I just don’t know what they’re up to, other than successfully irritating existing customers. The streaming-only option is $8 per month. To add one disc out at a time adds $2, but from there, it gets wacky. You’d expect the cost to have multiple discs out would stay proportional - ie: if it costs $2 to add a single disc at a time to the streaming plan, 2 discs at a time should add $4, but instead, it’s $7 more. 
Not for a while. We have a two disk plan, and two queues, and relatively little of what we watch is streamable (and none of it is in Redbox kiosks.) For some things, like some MST3K, I do stream by hooking my computer up to the TV and it works great - especially for ones I swear I haven’t seen before but soon find out I have. But until they get stuff like Mad Men streamable, no thanks.