I have been a longtime netflix customer. As a movie lover and a film maker I watch a lot of movies and netflix is a godsend. Latley we are watching more and more movies using their streaming service on our home projection system. The quality is pretty good but the selection is quite limited. If hollywood is smart they would make it easy for people to rent and watch ALL their movies online through various on demand video services.
Farhad Manjoo at slate has a good proposal for hollywood.
I’ve been watching most of my movies and a lot of my TV shows through Netflix for at least three years now. But lately my red envelopes have been piling up; I’ve gone weeks without watching anything on DVD. That’s because the superfast Internet connection that my apartment building recently tapped into gives me immediate access to just about every recent movie or TV show I’d care to watch. I can download an hourlong show in less than 10 minutes; a movie takes about 15. I can watch these on my computer or—with a DVD player that accepts USB thumb drives—on my TV.
I would gladly pay a hefty monthly fee for this wonderful service—if someone would take my money. In reality, I pay nothing because no company sells such a plan. Instead I’ve been getting my programming from the friendly BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Pirates aren’t popular these days, but let’s give them this—they know how to put together a killer on-demand entertainment system.
I sometimes feel bad about my plundering ways. Like many scofflaws, though, I blame the system. I wouldn’t have to steal if Hollywood would only give me a decent online movie-streaming service. In my dreams, here’s what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selection—50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.) Don’t gum it up with restrictions, like a requirement that I watch a certain movie within a specified time after choosing it. The only reasonable limit might be to force me to stream the movies so that I won’t be able to save the flicks to my computer. Beyond that, charge me a monthly fee and let me watch whatever I want, whenever I want, as often as I want.