January 08, 2005
Netflix, finally!
We've been using Netflix now since October 2000 (wow, time flies) and have loved it from day one. It's great to always have a movie to watch that we haven't seen. It's true that sometimes we keep a movie for months without watching but it's still great to always know you've got something new and you don't have to drive out to the local Blockbuster store to get one. It's also nice to never be concerned about returning movies on time and late fees.
Today we got some mail from Netflix promoting two new features they're offering: Friends and Profiles. It's about time they started leveraging what they had and going beyond the original idea. Blockbuster has clearly caught on to the advantages of the mail-rentals approach with all the changes they've made over the last year.
These two features are a good start, but I still hope it's just the beginning. Instead of setting up real friends together to share their ratings and recommendations on movies, it would be cool for the reverse feature to be available also. It seems like they have all the data needed to analyze ratings I've entered over the years and match me up with new "like-the-same-movie-type-of-friends-though-we're-complete-strangers" who share the same likes and dislikes. I think that would be an at least interesting way of discovering movies that I might otherwise never run across.
The profiles feature seems cool as well but I'm not sure we're going to use that since it's just the two of us and it's been working well as is so no need to fix anything there. It does seem useful for bigger families.
I wish they'd go ahead now and come up with a better way of browsing new releases. I always end up going to other sites (usually Amazon) to browse new releases. Though I can't say I've found the perfect site to do that on. We always seem to realize months (if not years) after a movie we missed in the theaters comes out on DVD. For the last couple of months, I've been subscribed to some of the Netflix RSS feeds including the New Releases one and that's certainly helped. But there are hundreds of new DVDs in that list every time it gets updated, including movies that are ancient but just came out on DVD for the first time and other random DVDs such as fitness titles, etc. It's kind of time-consuming to go through the list and not miss some you may have wanted to see.
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Posted by gus at January 8, 2005 10:08 PM
