anyway try go here if you are leaveing netflix:

http://netflixcommunity.ning.com/forum/topics/goodbye-netflix

Oh! Thanks for reminding me. I knew there was something I was meaning to do!

Hey, who was going to come over and watch the Princes Bride? Oh well, might as well send it back.

The DVD rental may be good for when the streaming of a given TV series runs out and you want to watch then next season sooner than later. Not that that always works.

by the way, i stream netflix through my xbox onto my 37″ lcd tv. it looks *great* and i have noticed that the quality of the picture has gone up in the last year. it always looks HD-ish now, when before it could look old worn out VHS-ish.

I would gladly pay the new price they have inflicted upon you if it meant I could access the same content! Instead I’ll keep paying the exorbitant price for cable and dream of a world where an arbitrary line on a map doesn’t quadruple shipping costs and decimate Netflix content.

BTW, regarding DVD quality, I checked the “blueray” box on my Netflix account several months back so the “dvd”s come as bluerays. But, like you say, I don’t get very many of them. I should probably cancel that service or start using it for real.

Allow current customers a deal with future customers getting the new price, maybe with the current price only lasting for, say, a year. But they didn’t do that.

I started with Netflix a couple of months ago and opened my account under the current price structure. Not that that does anything for the existing customers, but suffice to say I was really confused by the email I got from them.

The splitting of the stores really doesn’t make any sense unless they’re planning on offing the disc biz, and here’s a problem with that.

Actually there are a lot of folks who just aren’t interested in discs anymore. My guess would be that they separated them to see whether the disc biz even makes sense anymore. Keep in mind that buying hard media for rental costs a hell of a lot more than it does for direct consumers. Netflix has to keep up a relatively high levels of stock for a whole lot of movies and tee vee, which costs a whole lot of money. Streaming is a lot cheaper for them.

Also keep in mind a lot of people are switching towards 1080p or better high def. While I daresay we’re a ways off from DVDs being obsolete, it is coming. And the obsolescence of optical media won’t be all that far behind. While it takes a few minutes to load, I can watch high def content streamed directly to my tee vee. It is near enough to instant through my PC, that it might as well be (though admittedly I am privileged to have built a decent PC that can multitask as an HTPC – better than it would have beem, due to an Amazon mistake and some wheeling and dealing).

Bottom line, I doubt they will have disc service for a whole lot longer. They sure as hell aren’t going to change over to blu ray and would do better to just improve their infrastructure to handle the higher demands of a changing media paradigm. I can almost guarantee that the cable/satellite tee vee paradigm won’t even exist in a decade and hard media formats won’t be all that far behind.

I just built an HTPC for a friend that doesn’t even have an optical drive. He has a media server that contains a blu ray drive. He just puts in discs and they automatically rip – full content, except for warnings and previews. Everything in the system is low wattage – especially the HTPC, which sports a SSD. The media server has a solid state system drive, so the only time mechanical drives run is when it is copying whatever media is going to be watched to the server system drive for streaming. The vast majority of the time neither machine has any moving parts and power consumption is barely to this side of nothing when they’re idle. Overall they consume far less power than most “traditional” media devices.

He is far from alone.

Greg –

Or, we could go to Amazon.com, netflix streaming competition. I pay amazon 70 bucks a year so I can have a handful of “free” movies. To watch each of seasons 4 and 5 on amazon would be 40 bucks (total, 80 bucks). I assume boxed sets would be 25 bucks each. Or we could have the higher end cable. That’s close to 200 bucks a month.

First…HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! It’s half that for me, because I am a student…

Are you really displeased with their “free” selection? I mean personally I prefer the netflix interface, because it flows from one episode to the next more easily – easily enough that Dave can manage to start another (though that is not necessarily a good thing if I doze off in the afternoon – too much Diego, Dora or “My Little Pony” will rot the brain – especially the latter). But netflix doesn’t have “Doctor Who” or “Highlander” the tee vee series – the latter being very conducive to a vegetative state.

Personally, I just got the prime membership for the free two day shipping – and because I got two trials and then a full year free when I made my account a student account – and now I pay $35 a year.