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Wednesday, November 24, 2010
So I'd already heard about it on the news. And then, in accordance with the prophecy, I received my email informing me: my Netflix subscription was going up. Yes, just by a dollar, but up nevertheless.
I have a love-hate relationship with Netflix. I think they have a great business model, and I love the fact that, for the most part, our membership kept us out of the video rental store. Well, not our grown kids, but that's another story.I also love the fairly new ability to stream video to my computer or my iPhone so that I can watch a movie in bed, in the car, etc. without bothering anyone else. This is especially nice when riding between here and our families in north Texas after dark, when it's very hard to read.
But up until now, my membership has included DVD's...at times I've paid for the level where you can have up to 3 DVDs out at a time; more recently I've reduced that to just one, plus the unlimited streaming hours. During the hustle and bustle that was the wedding, I lost one of the DVDs and had to pay full price for it (even though the lady on the phone asked me, "Don't you just want to say it was lost in the mail?"). That cost me the equivalent of nearly two months of membership. Ouch. And I never even watched it!
So...when Netflix announced yesterday that 1) my plan was going up in price, and 2) they would now offer a plan with NO DVDs and just the unlimited streaming video, I decided to make the switch. No more waiting to get the DVDs in my queue, no more looking for those red envelopes, no more losing movies. And my membership now goes DOWN by a dollar.
The down side is that there is still a limited number of movies (and documentaries, my favorite) available to stream. This is bound to increase rapidly with Netflix's new focus on this model, but for now I won't have the selection I used to. Not that I'm a huge movie watcher...often I like the IDEA of watching a movie more than I actually like doing it...but it was nice to have the option of practically anything I could think of. Now, if we have our heart set on a particular movie, we'll have to hope we can order it on-demand from cable. We're so spoiled.
Anyway, it got me thinking about how much the world has changed during the second half of my adult life (the second half of what I've lived so far!) and how sometimes just the choices are overwhelming. Remember the days when you could either watch TV or read? No, I guess most of you don't ;-)
Labels: Fun, Movies, Technology
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