I was looking at a 30 day free trial (mostly for currency in an online game through an offer). Many many people I know have it, but I’m not sure I watch enough TV/movies to make it worth it for me. I would mainly be watching through DVDs and my laptop.
Should I just sign up and see how I use it? How much would/should I watch to make it worth it beyond the trial period?
It’s $8 a month. If you watch movies regularly it’s worth it. I don’t use their DVD service. The whole getting DVDs in the mail and sending them back always seemed like it would be a hassle. I do use their streaming service, and it’s great. They’re always adding content, so there’s always something to watch.
I like being able to watch what I want, whenever I want, on any device I choose. TV, computer, laptop, tablet, and phone. One of the neat things about the service is I can begin to watch a program or movie on my TV and when I switch to my laptop or tablet the program picks up where it left off on my TV.
Get it.
Not enough information to determine a meaningful answer.
What are your other options for the kind of movies/TV shows you watch or want to watch? And, yeah, you pretty much have to know how many discs you go through a month and what the prices of your other options are to compare anything.
For example: We watch less than 3 discs of anything that we don’t own each month. We’re not particularly picky - that is, we rarely get fixated on a specific title, we just decide we want to watch “a movie” and generally manage to find something appealing in a limited selection. There’s a bunch of Redboxes around here that are already on my daily commute. Redbox charges $1.25 per disc (I think), no monthly fee.
On those rare occasions we do want to watch something specific and not in Redbox’s catalog, we don’t generally need to watch it RIGHT NOW. We live right down the street from a library that’s part of a huge system which will order what we want from another library if they don’t have it already. So it’s obviously a better deal for us just to use Redbox and the library.
For what we like to watch, Netflix streaming pretty well sucks, by the way. We have my mom’s account programmed into our XBOX360, and sometimes do try to find something to watch on there. There’s a very limited selection, the browsing and search is incredibly unintuitive and clunky to use and it’s very heavy on TV shows, not movies, only they’re not even the TV shows we want to see. If anything, their streaming “service” is serving to drive us *away *from Netflix. Once I blew through Downton Abbey in a weekend, that was the end of that. Obviously, Onomatopoeia likes different stuff. Nothing wrong with that…but it shows that you’d be best served to look carefully at their selection before your trial time is up, and make sure that what they offer is what you watch.
They’re planning to launch the streaming service here in Norway in the next few months. I wonder if it will be worth it for our family.
Is the subscription per laptop/device or can you have multiple devices in the same household? That’s going to make a big difference for us.
Here you can have multiple devices in one household. That’s actually how we ended up with my mother’s account on our XBOX: WhyKid had his XBOX at her house and hooked it up and put in her account info. Turns out it saves it and works at our house, too. I’m not entirely sure that it’s kosher to use at our house, but I’m not too concerned that they’re going to sue me over a seasons’ worth of Downton Abbey…
You might want to try the DVD-only subscription. The disc selection is a lot bigger than the streaming selection.
I think of the DVD service as an immense library, whereas the streaming service is more like having a bunch of extra TV channels.
You can activate your account on up to 6 devices, but you can only use 2 of those simultaneously.
At my house we have it on both computers, the Wii and the PS3 but if Kiddo A is watching on the Wii and Kiddo B is watching on a computer and I want to watch on my PS3, guess what? One of the kiddos needs to go read a book.
The real question is- what do you like watching?
Netflix has a ton of B movies, foreign movies and old movies. The documentary selection is great. The tv selection is alright.
It streams very little new, big budget, mainstream movies.
Yes, it depends on what you like to watch. I have more programs lined up in my Netflix streaming queue than I could reasonably watch in a lifetime.
Thats how I am. I am always amazed at how many good films can be streamed. My only complaint is that not enough are HD. It was also dissappointing that Criterion aligned itself with Hulu. Losing alot of those films was bad.
That’s the opposite of me - I’m more the person who looks for movies he wants to see and then orders them from Netflix. I find the streaming option frustrating because it only occasionally has the movies I’m looking for. So I’m a DVD subscriber, but don’t subscribe to the streaming.
It’s all about how you want to use the service.
Exactly. I like to browse and find cool stuff I never even knew existed, so searching for a title doesn’t work well for me, nor does searching a very limited selection of stuff I’ve already seen. I want a deep browsable library of titles, sorted by genre but then alphabetical, please. I blame 7 years of managing a Blockbuster. 
I’ve had Netflix since they were a fairly new company. I always hated Blockbuster, and at the time I started, I was living in a Queens relying only on mass transit, and Blockbuster and the one other video store required a special trip. It was extraordinarily inconvenient. Bought a DVD player, got a Netflix coupon, started getting DVDs (with a much better selection than Blockbuster in-store) and was an immediate convert.
I still get DVDs for stuff that the studios won’t allow Netflix to stream and enjoy streaming for TV shows and documentaries I’ve missed. I wish the studios would pull their heads out of their asses and allow more content to be made available, but they are petulant children who don’t like that Netflix was able to make money off of their movies where they can’t. So rather than license them to Netflix and share in the profits, they hold them back because they think that people who watch on Netflix won’t buy DVDs (here’s a hint to the studio shitheads - don’t want or need, and won’t buy, a DVD for something I’m going to watch just once).
A hassle? Really? You go to the mailbox, which I do daily, anyway. (And in my case, it’s mounted to the wall just outside the front door, so I don’t have to actually step outside.) You tear open the mailer and remove DVD. When you’ve finished watching the DVD you put it back in the mailer, remove protective paper from the gummy strip (getting tired?), fold the flap to seal and put it back on the mailbox for postman to pick up.
I guess it’s all in your perspective. Making two trips to a Blockbuster to pick up and return - now THAT was a hassle. So to me, Netflix mailing me the discs was a vast improvement. If all you’ve ever known is streaming, that whole going to the mailbox and opening the mailer might seem exhausting.
It became worth it for us when we realized every Star Trek series is on it. We’re doing a full rewatch of DS9, finished a “just the good stuff but in chronological order” watch of Voyager, and will watch episodes from The Original Series and Next Generation on a whim. (As far as Enterprise goes, I watched the one with the Ferengi, because I like the guest actors.)
For people who grew up in the early 90s and are just having kids of their own, the huge Power Rangers back catalogue is brilliant. Actually kid’s shows are one of the biggest appeals; Invader Zim! MLP:FiM! A:tLA! If those initialisms mean nothing to you it might not be quite as worth it.
The documentary selection is great too, and there’s random Canadian films like Wilby Wonderful, and honestly I could go on like this forever.
True story: our average monthly internet use went from about 30gb total, including non-Netflix streaming, to over 150gb a month when we got our Netflix subscription.
You mean people who grew up watching Power Rangers are having kids? Oh crap, I feel old!
Isn’t that exactly what I said in the OP? 
I’d like to figure out HOW to determine if it’s worth it for me, and if it’s worth it to even try a trial in the first place.
Some good thoughts so far; keep 'em coming!
It’s worth pointing out that while adding the service is free (other than what you would normally pay for Netflix) on Wii, PS2, and many recent bluray players (and hey, even some newer TVs), to use it on an Xbox 360 you have to pay MS money to upgrade your Live account to gold status. If you’re already using gold, there’s no added fee, but if you don’t play your games online, it’s probably not worth paying for both Netflix and XBLGold to get it going.
Well, it’s eight bucks a month for unlimited streaming.
If you’re a regular renter of one-dollar movies from Redbox or similar vendors, and we assume that your average movie is 110 minutes (a number I pulled out of my bottom), you’ll begin to save money after watching 14.6 hours of content in one month.
So if you think you’ll watch Netflix for more than 30 minutes a day, the streaming service is probably worth it!
edit: I have an unlimited data plan on my phone, so I can even watch Netflix on my lunch break at work or listen to cartoons while I’m driving in my car. I get way more than my money’s worth.
It became worth it for us when we grabbed all the MST3K DVDs they had available. Those were fun. Now we mostly use it for television, with the occasional classic movie when it comes up in conversation.