So Netflix is rolling out the Blu-Ray price increase (geekery)
Let's see. I'm on the one-at-a-time plan and I tend to watch one or two movies a month. This costs me $9/month. (Sure, this also includes unlimited streaming access, which would be great if I had a PC at home, or wanted to spend another $100 for a Roku box, or whatever, but I hardly even have time to watch my shipped discs.) That's already more expensive than just renting from iTunes or the like. I mostly watch older movies, and I'd say only about 5% of my queue is in Blu-Ray. So I'm getting a 10% price increase for a 50% quality increase which covers 5% of my queue. Lovely. I'm also pretty sure that I'm not an atypical user, in this case.
I should probably just switch to the two-per-month service, but then I lose out on the unlimited streaming that I don't use anyway. Or maybe I should just go to Internet-based rentals. Between iTunes (AppleTV), Amazon (TiVo), and PSN (PS3) I certainly am not starving for choices, and even if I were to get all-HD it'd still cost me less than Netflix (and be less of a hassle as well). Not to mention I already get plenty of movies "free" through cable and Hulu and the like.
Of course, Netflix has the huge advantages of the queue (not that it's really any different than a filtered movie list at this point, seeing as how it'll take me about 10 years to get through it at this rate) and a gigantic selection, but the online services' selections are growing too.
It's a bit funny how Netflix killed the video rental store, but online video distribution is poised to kill Netflix.
Here's my own cost analysis, assuming I rent on average two movies a month (but still want the ability to watch more if I feel like it):
| Service | SD | HD | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netflix | N/A | N/A | $10 |
| Amazon | $4 | ??? | $8 |
| iTunes | $3-4 | $4-5 | $6-10 |
| PSN | $3-$6 | $3-6 | $6-12 |
For someone who watches movies nearly every day (or even manages to get in one a week), Netflix is still a much better deal, but I think that on average I just don't watch enough movies for even their lowest tier of service to be worth it, and who the hell has the time for that anyway?
So, for now I've just switched to the Netflix 2-per-month no-Blu-Ray plan ($6) and if I want to watch more movies I'll just rent them online. Hooray. 7:00 PM Actually I decided I'd keep Blu-Ray after all. $7/mo and still getting HD is nice, and still the cheapest option in general. Although long-term I think Blu-Ray will actually be cheaper for Netflix, since the initial purchase price is more than balanced out by how much more durable the medium is.
Comments
However, last time I tried unbox to my Tivo, the image quality was atrocious.
LJ-side comments make sense for the really popular feeds but for things like personal blogs it's just dumb.
There are many open suggestions in the LJ suggestions community about this and several quite-reasonable fixes have been suggested but the closest there is to an official response is a complete ignorance of what the problems are "because it works fine for qwantz and xkcd" (ignoring that those are really the exceptional use cases, here).
Really I'd just rather if people were to use real RSS aggregators instead of LiveJournal, but I know enough people who love LJ and don't see the value in Yet Another Thing To Read that it's important to me that the LJ feed works well.
Anyway I've changed both the appearance and verbiage of the note (it takes a while for LJ to pick up those changes of course) so maybe it'll be better now?
Your new notice is less obnoxious, so I think that'll work.