I decided to watch a movie tonight. I pulled up Netflix and looked at my queue, and it struck me how ridiculously few items from my queue were available for streaming. So few that I decided to count them. I have 257 items in my Netflix queue (counting multi-season and multi-disc entries as a single item). Of those 257, only 28 are available for streaming. That’s just 11% coverage. In addition, 12 aren’t available for streaming or on disc, leaving 217 to rent as discs.
I just got a phone call from one of the lawyers involved in the Netflix class action lawsuit I wrote about a while back. Apparently my letter had caught his attention, and he wanted to discuss my objections to the proposed settlement in more detail. It turned out to be quite an interesting conversation. I explained that the first issue was that I felt the proposed settlement gave far too much benefit to the legal firm, rather than the allegedly wronged customers of Netflix.
I’m a happy NetFlix customer. I have been since either 1999 or early 2000, I forget exactly. It’s a good service—you queue up a list of DVDs, you keep a number of discs at home, and each time you mail one back they mail you the next one from the list. A while ago some guy named Frank Chavez took exception to Netflix’s advertising. Their ads were offering “unlimited” rentals, and Chavez discovered that they actually deliver DVDs to you more slowly once you hit more than 12 rentals in a month.
Netflix have a new friends list feature. If you’re a friend of mine, you can invite me using my usual address (see bottom of web page). If you haven’t received an invite from Netflix to try the new friends feature, you can e-mail me and I’ll send you an invite instead. Make sure you let me know which e-mail address you use for Netflix…