vedana.net

Not Addicted... Yet

Saw my second-ever Netflix DVD over the weekend, Michael Moore's Roger & Me (excellent film). Netflix is absolutely brilliant, especially for lazy geeks like myself: log into netflix.com, search or browse by genre, click the big "Rent" button, and it arrives by snail a day or two later. 3 DVDs at a time for $20/month. In the future it'll be even easier:

"We named the company Netflix and not "DVD By Mail" for a reason, which is we plan to lead the downloading market and over time we will offer both DVDs by mail and downloading. The consumer will be able to choose."

Regarding piracy, Netflix is doing for movies what Apple has done for music downloads:

"Netflix is one of the services that is a piracy-inhibitor basically because it is such a good value. If for $20 you can rent unlimited movies, your incentive to do piracy is a lot less."

An aside: I wonder if Apple (or somebody) will buy Netflix some day? Apple's interest in things-dv (iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, etc.) plus the iTMS's infrastructure plus Akamai could be an extremely cool movie/download platform. Even cooler if it distributed CC multimedia...

Though I've got 8 or so movies queued up, I don't yet consider myself an addict (there's too much deadtree to consume, and it's a higher priority than passive movie watching). This though, is true addiction: 0.6 movies/day for the past 5 months. I wonder if Goldman is proud, ashamed, both or neither?

Now if we could just get Netflix to open up some web services...

[Motley Fool link via Erik Benson]