We are not cable TV people. We have had access to cable at various times but we were not paying for this 'luxury'. What we felt about cable was that although it was great that there was something on almost all the time, we never actually watched a full program of anything. Most of the time when we watched cable TV we were channel hopping due to the unremitting interruptions of commercials.
Let's say we were watching some movie on a channel and a commercial came on. Of course we would change the channel which with cable was an endless procession of channels and 'Hey, look at that - that is an interesting program'. We would watch this interesting program for a while and then 'Oh no, we are missing the movie' and we would switch back to find we had missed some vital piece of movie information.
What was worse were those times when we wanted to watch something and would begin to surf through the channels endlessly because even though there were hundreds of channels, nothing was on. Or if something worthy was on, we had already seen it. Neither of us were capable of finding the channel guide station and even though the Sunday paper provided a TV guide we were incapable of keeping track of it.
The thing was that neither my husband nor I watched all that much TV so we never could get into the rhythm as to when the 'good' shows would be on. It was all very random and made even more so by our channel surfing. What really aggravated us was that we would sometimes sit there channel hopping for upwards of an hour or two without actually watching anything for longer than a minute.
So we became movie renters. Blockbuster video was our place to go and everything about that era left something to be desired. First of all, we had to drive to it and it was in one of the most inconvenient places to access from our house. Second we had to time our acquisition runs so that we would have a chance of getting some sort of quality movie. We were as unprepared for Blockbuster as we were for watching cable in that we never knew what would be our options. These trips were never a strategic strike and always entailed wandering through the store staring at the walls of movies and trying to decide if we wanted what they had to offer. Worse would be when we knew we wanted a certain movie and were vying with other Blockbuster customers for those precious few videos available. Nothing is more tragic than that sinking feeling you get from knowing that all the good movies have already been rented and you are left searching the stacks of titles trying to find something. We sucked at returning the movies on time as well. If we were to have totaled all the late fees we paid for our movie renting phase at Blockbuster I am sure we could have just outright purchased most of the movies.
So we stopped doing the Blockbuster thing and entered our 'buying DVDs at Walmart' phase of movie watching. Walmart had a five dollar movie bin where you could scrounge through a very thoroughly riffled pile of somewhat old movies. Sometimes they would have double features or boxed sets for the five dollar fee. They even eventually had all sorts of old movies and cartoons for just a dollar. Each week we would select something to buy and our movie library began to grow. Now let me tell you something about a movie library. You practically never watch the movie again. There are a few exceptions to the classics, but basically what you have done is paid a similar fee to renting a movie and then have agreed to keep the movie at your home. A DVD box might be small, but as the weeks go buy they start to add up and soon they have to have their own shelf unit. All of this for something you will probably never use again.
Thus the idea of not keeping the movies began to become very appealing to us. It was either that or add on a special addition to our house just to keep all the growing pile of DVDs. This was when we heard about Netflix. A friend of mine told me about it and at first I couldn't believe it. They mail the DVD to you and then you mail it back when you are done. Better yet, you didn't pay for postage. And even more miraculous - there were no late fees. NO LATE FEES. I think the people that came up with Netflix were at the right place at the right time in a big way. They even gave us a month free when we signed up.
How glorious. You just selected what you wanted online and they sent it to you within days. As soon as you sent that DVD back they sent you another one within days. You could also select to receive more than one movie at a time. We tried that for a short time. This was when the cracks began to appear in the glorious perfection of our Netflix experience.
It turns out that when you get a deal that allows you an unlimited amount of movies whose only requirement is that you return the movie before you get the next one you feel compelled to watch the movies as quickly as possible. This way you can return the movie and get the next one. In order to get the most out of what you pay each month, you want the most movies. It all hinges on you getting the movie back to them as quickly as possible. We discovered that we could get about three movies a week if we watched them the day they arrived and put them back in the mail the next day. That is a dozen movies a month. What a deal. The problem is that I didn't want to watch 6 hours of movies a week every week.
The problem was compounded by the fact that my husband and I cannot watch a movie together. It turns out we have different styles. My style is to sit and watch the movie from start to finish in a quiet dark room. His style involves the fast forward button through all the 'needless dialog' and then asking me questions about what is happening in the movie. So, in the interest of preserving our marriage we don't watch movies together. This means in order for us to 'get the most out of Netflix' we have double the running time of the movie. So the movie gets to us about 3pm. We must both watch the movie and get it into the mail by 8am the next day. No exceptions or else we were 'not getting our money's worth'.
I began to resent how the movies were running my life. It is sort of the same way I resent how leftovers run my life. My husband will say "That such and such leftover 'needs to be eaten up'". Well, I have needs too and one of them is not letting some needy food boss me around. I felt the same way about the movies. They needed me to watch them, but I didn't always need to watch them. Yet if I didn't watch them then Netflix was getting the better end of the deal. I call this time in my life the oppressed movie watching guilt phase. There is probably some sort of official mental illness designation for it by now.
But then when it seemed I was going to have to resign myself to a life of forced movie watching or suffer guilt, Netflix bailed me out. I discovered their instant watch feature. Apparently this is something they always offered, but it took us a couple of years before we ever even tried it. Streaming movies to our computer. I was very skeptical at first. Our computers. The ones that were malevolent enough to crash on us just weeks before our movie debut, wiping out hundreds of hours of work and leaving us with mere days to restore order. Those computers were going to do something nice like show us movies. Ha.
But it worked and it worked very well. Not only that, but they had hundreds and hundreds of instant watch options. The selections seemed endless. They didn't just have movies, they had practically every TV show from back in my childhood to present day. Now, we were not about to waste one of our precious DVD options on a TV show, but limitless amounts of streaming movies meant we could indulge in anything that struck our fancy. This was heaven.
Of course in application it isn't as perfect as what it seemed. First of all, when faced with a nearly endless choice your brain just sort of freezes up. It is the endless cable selection issue all over again. Sometimes the find a movie part of movie watching takes up almost as much time as watching the movie. The finding a movie part is also complicated by the fact that Netflix does not list all the movies it features under instant watch in a logical way. It has categories and movies are classified under listings such as 'Romantic Comedies' or 'Science Fiction Adventure'. We have found these categories to be incomplete - almost as if Netflix is hiding some of the movie selections. We can find them if we ask for them by their title, but they just don't appear in the offerings of the categories they present to you.
Something else that is a snake in the Netflix garden of Eden is that I think my husband nearly overdosed on the streaming video the first few weeks we tried it. After all, if we pay a certain fee and we can watch an unlimited amount of streaming movies, then the 'deal' gets better the more movies you watch right? On weekends he has sometimes stayed up all night watching movie after movie. Due to his high movie consumption he has also succumbed to watching the 'dregs'. These are movies that barely rate a star or two. This kind of thing happens when you have watched all the good movies but now have an addiction you must feed.
He has discovered many diamonds in the rough and who knows maybe someday he will be able to enter some sort of obscure movie trivia contest and win a million dollars. His 'dreg' watching does weird things to the Netflix algorithms though. Netflix does its best to try and offer you choices it thinks you might like based on other movies you have watched. You can even rate the movies you watch and if you want you can also be a movie critic and post your views. We don't go that far, but Netflix is always asking us to rate the things we watch. This means I am often asked to rate one of the dregs my husband has watched and Netflix thinks I like things under such topics as 'Violent, Suspenseful, Psychological Thrillers' or 'Supernatural Horror Movies'.
All in all, the Netflix experience is far superior to any previous cable or movie renting experience. Now if they will just create some sort of spouse feature that will let us sign in under different names so I don't have to be asked if I want to watch some thing called "Valley of the Zombies" or "Burn Witch Burn".
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