Netflix in Switzerland has very little content compared to the U.S.
We don’t have that many channels in English.
For certain shows, such as Chuck, Buffy, Eureka, Black Books, etc., we’ll get in the mood to binge the entire series. For the longer ones, we might take a while (we’ve been working on Buffy/Angel for more than a year, currently paused again), but others (such as Spaced) can be done in a few days of cold snowy weather.
Currently waiting to buy the complete series of iZombie and Killjoys. We caught some episodes, even on the airplane, but can’t watch them here unless we pay more than the cost of the media.
Which is the other thing. Watch a movie in the theater or buy it for home? For home is cheaper and we can watch it more than once, AND it’s got the gag reel. This is why we have most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Haven’t seen any of them in the theater.
Many of the DVDs you can get from Netflix have special features, though only the ones found on the disk with the movie. Especially DVDs from the Criterion collection.
Not streaming but better than buying.
I don’t buy many at this time but I have a fair amount already. I’ve been buying DVDs since the late 90s I guess. I recently bought Ralph Wrecks the Internet and regretted wasting my money on it.
I used to buy them quite frequently around a decade ago but these days I mainly use streaming services. I watch fewer movies in general relative to TV shows. I do miss the extras a bit though in truth not all that much since there is always new stuff to watch that is interesting. Watching extra features and listening to audio commentaries has become one of those things I remember fondly of bygone days. I did pull out my LOTR extended edition DVDs recently, perhaps the pinnnacle of the medium. I may go through the commentaries and special features again for old time’s sake.
I do, but I always think on it first. I have to make sure it’s a film I really want to watch multiple times. I’m trying to reduce clutter and so I’m really trying to not buy so many physical Blu rays and physical books since I’m probably moving soon.
It’s definitely not like ten years ago where I’d be with my ex bf at Target and grab some random DVD and stick it in the cart.
I agree with others, you should try netflix DVD by mail. I used to have it until they split the DVD and streaming services apart (it used to be you got both for $12 or so).
However as was mentioned, I think the DVD service isn’t nearly as good as it used to be. There aren’t as many distribution centers so it takes longer to get your discs. I just looked into it, and now its $12 for 2 DVDs out at a time. It used to be you’d get 3 DVDs at a time and streaming for the same price.
I don’t think there are any real competitors to netflix DVD though. There are some smaller companies, but they mostly do niche and cult films by mail.
If you want to get rid of your DVDs, sell them in bulk on craigslist. They usually go for $1 a DVD that way.
If I’m going to pay for access to something, I might as well own it and be sure of having access to it for as long as I want. I don’t want to spend the money on a bunch of streaming services at once, and if I juggle them around based on what’s available then most of the year I don’t get to watch a bunch of content. Putting the DVD in the player is just simpler.
I still buy CDs, too, which may be even more unusual these days.
I voted “Never did” but I do own maybe six movies on DVD. But I figure six divided by how old DVD/BR tech is is close enough to zero to qualify. And I never watch those six movies anyway which is why I never bought more. In fact, I don’t think our BluRay player has been plugged in for the last couple years. Either we find something via streaming or, if it’s something that we somehow “need” to watch and isn’t on a monthly sub service, we can still find it as a one-off streaming rental from Amazon, Google, Vudu, etc. I’m sure there’s exceptions but I haven’t had it affect me yet.
In the last year I have been buying sets of blank DVD disks so I can download/burn some long length old movies/documentaries onto them for viewing on TV. It’s no fun to tell the kids “gather around the laptop”.
Maybe it depends on the types of content one is interested in. Netflix DVD and streaming began to require too much work to manage a queue (DVDs not available or long waits) and find genuinely interesting content.
I occasionally watch something on Amazon Prime Video, but we’ve got it for shipping. If I were to pay for a streaming service, it would be Criterion Collection or BritBox.
Regarding netflix DVD, when I mail them back on Monday by putting them in my mailbox for Monday pickup, 95% of the time I get the next disc in my queue on Thursday.
I only use the one-disc bluray plan for $10, but I assume going for two at a time won’t change the mail speed.
If you’re looking for two discs per week, one for Friday and one for Saturday, then you’re pretty much the poster child for who the service is for. The only wildcard is the mail service. I say try it for one month to see if it’s fast enough. To that end, if you mail Friday’s movie back on Saturday, that should help ensure you have your two discs on time every week.
The 2-bluray plan is $15 a month, which has to be way cheaper than buying 8 movies from amazon each month.
If you do try it out, post back to let us know how it goes.
Can’t you use your laptops HDMI port to connect it to the TV?
Because I can’t, it fucks up my laptops software for some reason. Wish I could but on both laptops it fucked up the software and I don’t know why. Maybe its the cable I used.
I currently use a digital media player. I’ll download a film, transfer it to USB and use the media player to watch it on TV.
If Netflix still bundled the DVD service with the streaming service, I might have taken advantage of that, at least, with DVDs. But even then, I watched so few movies that I couldn’t justify buying it separately. (Hell, I don’t even actually have my own Netflix account. I just use my sister’s at times.)
Let me put it this way: I’ve never owned an HD TV, and thus never had any reason to buy a Blu-ray player. What movies I do watch are on my computer, and it only had a DVD drive. (I say “had” because I disconnected it when I installed an SSD.) That’s how long I’ve been transitioning away from normal TV.
Hence why I’m not sure I’m the type of person to vote in the poll.
I could but I wasn’t aware it was possible until I started doing the first few burns and tbh I quite enjoy having the physical copy anyway. I do it at work so it’s not all happening in the background while I’m busy doing something else.
I’ve switched to buying digital codes. Instead of paying $5-10 for a bluray (used, or on sale), I’ll spend $2-3 for a Movies Anywhere code so I can stream it. You know - those slips of paper inside your bluray case with a 12-16 digit code on it that you likely ignore or throw away? There’s a market for them.
Yes - the quality isn’t quite as good as it would be via a bluray player, but I’m getting probably 95-99% of the quality. Yes - there’s a very outside chance that all of the movie studios will decide to pull the rights, like Microsoft did with their e-books. But it’s the cost of a rental or less, and I’m assuming if that ever happens, my movies will all be obsolete in terms of resolution/format by then.
(In other news, if anyone has a stack of codes they’ve accumulated, I’d be happy to give you an offer!)
What does it screw up? I do this all the time - I just did it to watch Acorn streaming. Never a problem.
Have you tried your laptop with a projector with an HDMI connection? It is basically the same thing.
I buy movies. I like knowing that I have my movies when I want them and not to the caprices of the streaming services. I remember when Netflix was a real resource, but now it’s just another network. Also, I spent a lot of money and effort to set up my system, 3D Panasonic plasma and Dolby Atmos with a region-free 4K blu-ray player, to watch highly compressed streamed films.
I voted “I still buy them” because I do…but it’s very occasional now. I used to buy DVDs regularly for movies I would want to watch more than once. That added up over time to around 80–100 disks. Later I bought disks for American TV, since I live overseas and would otherwise probably never get to see many shows.
My buying trailed off when I had kids, had way less time and opportunity to watch movies, and had less space to store things in a very small apartment. I dumped all the cases and transferred the disks and inserts to a binder several years ago. Since then, I’ve bought very few disks, basically only for things that I knew would be very unlikely to make it to a rental outlet here or (later) to streaming. I’ve even had to cull my book collection repeatedly over the last few years, and most of my new fiction reading has been with ebooks. I still buy physical non-fiction though, because ebooks suck ass for indexes, footnotes, referring back to previous sections, etc.
I started buying some things from Apple in 2012. Hulu became available in my location in 2013, and Netflix in 2015. The promise of streaming — to make anything and everything available anytime and anywhere — has never fully materialized, and lately has started to regress, but streaming services have enough advantages that it’s mostly not worth it to buy physical media.
I would prefer not to have any more crap cluttering up the place, but disks are sometimes the best or only way to view something. Even so, I’ve bought literally only a handful of blu-ray disks since the current edition of the Format Wars was concluded, which is a small fraction of the number of DVDs I had bought over the same length of time in the previous format’s era.
I really, really wish that media rights would get sorted out properly, so that even things that are obscure and esoteric are available for those who want to see them, but there were tons of things that never made it past format bottlenecks. I’ve still never seen Babylon 5, for example, because there was never a DVD release of it and it aired during the several years where I basically never watched TV. There are dozens of books that I would like to read that have been out of print and essentially unavailable during my lifetime. There is no technical reason for their unavailability; it’s mostly just legal bullshit. No creators ever derive any benefit from their works being unavailable for purchase or consumption.
Streaming is still relatively new here and doesn’t have as big a take up or have as many options. And I personally don’t like them having all the control of what I can and can’t see when, so I am very much still in the hard-copy ownership camp.
I have no idea what happens, it has happened with 2 laptops.
Previous laptop, it would transmit video via HDMI but not sound. I had to hook up external speakers to the headphone jack for sound.
For my current laptop, It crashed my hard drive and I had to reinstall the entire operating system. I haven’t messed with my HDMI port since.
I’m not sure if the cable I’m using has issues (it is a 20 foot HDMI cable) or what exactly. But ever since my entire OS got corrupted I haven’t used it.