I just hit the two month mark on my Netflix subscription, and can honestly say it's been well worth the money for me. In the past two months, I've rented 24 videos. At a cost of about $20 a month (with tax), that is much cheaper than the approximately $96 those videos would probably have cost at any local rental place (figuring $4 a video), plus no time & gas money wasted getting to and from them. Not to mention I would have probably had to drive all over town to find some of the movies I've gotten from Netflix because they're not the blockbusters that fill the shelves of most stores. I've particularly enjoyed a lot of TV shows on DVD which most stores rarely carry except for the big sellers like the Sopranos and such.
A few friends of mine have signed up with Blockbuster following their drop to $14.99 / month, but I sort of feel like Netflix is the underdog that deserves a chance, and Blockbuster's very limited selection and high prices at their local store is what made me avoid renting many movies previously. Netflix's service hasn't been perfect, as I've had several mailings held up for no reason But this is in-line with reports from other "heavy" Netflix users, as they seem to try to slow up some of their frequent users in order to stem the losses they obviously incur from eating all those shipping costs. It's a minor annoyance sometimes, but hardly anything to make me cancel. With a distribution center right here in Cleveland, if I send a movie back Monday, I get my next one on Wednesday. Not too shabby.
A great site that I frequent is Hacking Netflix which is a blog with the obvious focus on Netflix, and it contains various news stories (both officially reported and user reported), user stories & opinions, and a very useful link page of new releases which you can use to put new movies right in your Netflix queue.

This entry was posted by Brad, on Monday, January 31, 2005. You can leave your response.