Awhile back when I visited my friend Amanda who gave me that aged Earl Grey tea, and who's really great in other ways too, I had some time alone in her apartment while she was at work, and I got to experience Netflix streaming.
It seemed pretty appealing, since I was typically spending way too much money on DVDs. The thing is, the disks get old, and also the industry comes up with new formats like Blu-ray, and then everything in my collection becomes out of date. It's becoming more and more pointless to buy media on plastic.
Copyright violation is one option. I'm totally in favor of that, until the powers-that-be fix our copyright laws so that things fall into the public domain on a more reasonable schedule. If they're not going to play fair with that, then neither should the rest of us.
Streaming the media on their terms is another option, and at Amanda's house I started to see that it could actually be kind of cool. I don't like renting disks from Netflix because I always take forever to send them back, so they don't send me more disks, and the process kind of bogs down. That's why I cancelled my old account in the first place. Streaming solves that problem because there's nothing to send back. I watch something, and presto! I can watch something else.
The price looked good, too - ten dollars a month for unlimited streaming. So, how could there be a problem? I'd just watch what I wanted when I wanted, and be happy.
But there are problems. First of all, the selection is not great. It's true that if I poke around I can find a lot of films I'd like to see; but the vast majority of the films available for streaming are just schlock that couldn't make money in the theater. Or in some cases when they do stream a decent film, they'll only make it available for a short time, and then take it away again.
Why would they do this? Disk space is cheap, there's not a lot of reason to make films available for a period of time and then yank them, unless the whole "streaming media" idea is not really what it seems to be.
Finally I figured it out - streaming media is not being offered as a service, but as a teaser. Of course! That's why the different pricing tiers all involve getting more and more simultaneous disks. You can stream a lot of B movies, or a few blockbusters, or some old stuff, or you can pay more for unrestricted access to every film in their database - on DVD.
I was really disappointed to realize that - it means they're not working towards making their whole archive available to everyone for streaming. Of course, I guess it should have been obvious from the start. "Working towards" is a lot easier for digital video than it is for something like books - just copy the movie data onto the drive, and you're done. No messy scanning or OCR operations that are required for books.
I'll probably stick with Netflix for now though, because as lame as it is, the price is low enough to be worth it, at least for a little while. Eventually I can't see it keeping my interest, and I'll probably go back to piracy, or maybe by then someone in the industry will have figured out that they should just make all their media available for a low monthly fee, and we can finally get past the whole issue.
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