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Nat Mishkin
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I just watched The Wonder Years, Season 1 Episode 1 and it was as great as I remembered it. Too bad the video quality is really awful but I'm guessing that's not Netflix's fault.
Netlix New Releases for October 4th, 2011 (Wonder Years, DS9 & New NBU Content)
New streaming releases in the past week include The Wonder Years (thanks Lahlia, Matt, Sean & Isaac), Tron: Legacy, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Biutiful, An Officer and a Gentleman, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Meet Joe Black, Malcolm in the Middle, Parks and Recreation, Storage Wars, Cindy Holland, ...
"Member Since December 1999" with no breaks although I think that date records only when the subscription-style plan started and that I started a bit before then. So long ago, it's hard to remember. I do remember the stiff cardboard envelopes and the long round trips to the only shipping center.
Devices: A BluRay player and an iPad.
Here's an idea for another poll: How many items in your DVD queue are (or will shortly be) available for instant watching? I haven't been a big online watcher (except for 2-3 seasons of catching up on "Lost" before the final season), but recently I was surprised to notice that around half of my top 50 are available.
How Long Have You Been a Netflix Subscriber?
I thought it might be interesting to ask all of you how long you've been a Netflix subscriber (you can find out by clicking on Your Account). How did you first hear about Netflix? What plans have you tried? Have you ever taken a "Netflix vacation?" How many Netflix-ready devices do you own?
Since most of my TV watching was already through Netflix, about 5 or more years ago, I cut my (Comcast) cable TV service back to the under-promoted "just the local broadcast channel" tier (roughly $13/month) when another price hike was coming through and making me want to gag. Last summer, when I moved to a new house that's closer to the broadcast towers, I dispensed with cable TV altogether.
That said I'm now only 8 miles from the transmitter and get less than ideal reception. Yes, it's just a rabbit ears in my attic (although I do have a decent RF amp on it and an unobstructed path), but geesh, I'd think that'd work more reliably than it does. Most of the channels are OK most of the time, but some of them regularly suck. I guess so many people get them over cable these days that no one really notices that OTA digital ain't so great?
Are You Thinking About Cutting the Cable TV Cord?
I don't know about your cable service, but I'm paying way too much for a lot of channels I'll never watch. The problem is that the ones we really like are not available online. We also live far from over-the-air HD TV, so we're not ready to cut cable TV yet, but we're thinking about it. NewTeeV...
I also have the BD390 and like it quite a bit. I bought it for its Netflix support and because it can play music and video files off my PC. (I don't even have an HD TV--just a 42" plasma 480p monitor--and have never even tried a BluRay disk.)
I've been catching up on "Lost" for the past few months or so (starting at Season 1). I watched the first couple of seasons by renting the disks but then switched to streaming and it's been great.
The YouTube support is cute, but not clearly that useful. If it had Pandora support, it'd be perfect. I'm hoping for that in a future firmware update. (BTW, the 2 firmware updates I've done went fine.)
A couple of small nuisances:
It's hung on me a couple of times. (It's so nice that the consumer electronics industry has finally brought this feature from the world of personal computers :-)
It can't fast forward when playing back my video files.
Also sometime when it starts a Netflix playback, I get something less than highest quality. This could be because of my ISP or any of the hops between me and Netflix, of course, but I have Verizon FiOS, so nominally my end should be pretty good. Interestingly, if I stop and restart playback, I can typically get better quality. (It seems to require starting the playback from the beginning--just resuming has never done it for me.)
Have a Netflix-Ready Device? What do You Like or Dislike About It?
Jeffrey writes, "I have been shopping around for a new Blu-ray player that will stream NETFLIX (and other content as well), and I have read a bunch of reviews on ALL of them. Do you have any recommendations as to what you think is the best one. It seems a lot of people have had problems with the...
Completely unimportant (except for that 4-out-at-a-time-at-3-out-at-a-time-price benny that, like a previous poster, I get), but fun to flash:
December 1999.
(It's kind of like checking out the date of the earliest email that I sent and that's archived in some place findable by a Google search.)
Actually, I have the vague sense that I actually started using Netflix a bit earlier. I'm not sure that the "Member since" date isn't actually marking when the whole "all you can eat" (with N out at a time) thing started. When I started there was simply a charge per disk rented, or something similar. Can anyone else remember the details of the original model?
How Important is Your Netflix Start Date?
Adria from the But You're a Girl blog is bummed that Netflix reset her start date. I was in a near fatal car accident in 2003 so I had a lot of time on my hands. I bought a DVD player and signed up for this thing called Netflix in August of that year. Having a broken wrist, I couldn’t do a lot o...
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