Netflix - Not bad! Qwikster - uh, never mind...

Ha! I bet too many people were renting it, keeping it, and saying it was 'lost in the mail' or whatevs.

We quit renting out Fight Club at the video store where I worked bcz people kept stealing it.

why do you have to pay extra for blu-ray? so dumb

yeah that is lame. they're already a bit overpriced as it is.

netflix randomly decided to send me an extra dvd. thanks netflix!

lol at Netflix suggesting I want "Critically-acclaimed Emotional Foreign Movies." Also I don't think they show any other type of 'foreign movies' in America.

"Critically-ignored Softcore Porn in the Guise of Arthouse Foreign Movies"

Tonight Netflix tells me I like "Visually-striking Cerebral Foreign Movies."

have had the PS3 Netflix disc for a while and have hardly watched anything. their selection isn't very good, and anything action-oriented is headache inducing. when the camera pans the whole screen sort of skips around in this weird way. could be my DSL isn't cutting the mustard.

It's almost like they've got a Meyers-Briggs profile for each movie.

yeah ive been hearing terrible things about the PS3 netflix being a jittery bandwidth hog, which is too bad because it works really well on xbox

"Visually-striking Emotional Foreign Movies "

I've only watched one movie with the PS3 disc, Persepolis, and it worked well enough I suppose. But it wasn't anywhere near the quality I'd expect, looked very fuzzy to me. And yeah, the selection is awful awful.

I've been using the hell out of the netflix streaming. The overall selection is mediocore, but there is some really good stuff in there. Lots of good docs and classics I haven't seen. There is more than enough to keep me entertained for months. And the selection seems to get better all the time.

http://instantwatcher.com/ is a really good site for keeping up to date on what's new with the instant watching.

If you're looking for newer movies you'll be disappointed with the selection, but if you want a seleciton of older movies it's pretty good. I actually looked for this thread to mention that in the last week or so there's been a rather large influx of terrific older movies - Kurosawa & Bergman films among others - and a bunch of new BBC shows.

instantwatcher.com is a great site; I subscribe to Netflix's New Instant Movies RSS feed but it's a bit hard to navigate the site to search for instant films.

There are quite a lot of good newer movies to stream though. The only gap is Hollywood films as far as I can tell and not to get all Morbs, but really who cares?

I kind of like the limited selection that the watch instantly feature has - it's forced me to finally check out a lot of stuff I've been postponing: the Up series (which is pretty awesome to watch over the course of a few days), Carnival of Souls, lots of stuff from the 30's/40's. And it's nice to have all 3 seasons of 30 Rock on hand when I get bored.

not surprisingly my high rating of andrei rublev has me on the "critically acclaimed cerebral foreign" list. they are also suggesting "dark dramas" because i like lars von trier.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/10/nyregion/20100110-netflix-map.html

Looking at the Chicago map, it's kind of hilarious to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Rachel Getting Married being rented most often along the affluent North Shore, and Marley and Me doing much better in the suburbs than in the city.

hilarious or expected?

Hilarious b/c it's expected.

I love Netflix on demand so much, although it has led to me watching way too much Doctor Who.

Just got this, starting off with father ted and only fools and horses

the LA one is making me sad. Can't someone in Compton rent Vicky Cristina Barcelona? Can't someone in West Hollywood see a Tyler Perry joint?

would love to see the maps around the time that Crash came out

<3 <3 <3 netflix for streaming L&O SVU

my nerdy roommate pointed out that the highest frequency "coraline" rentals in boston pretty much lined up with the red line, where many nerds live.

Hilarious b/c it's expected.

Yeah, hilarious like Milk doing well in the gay urban cores and Bedtime Stories doing well in the child-bearing suburbs.

Their streaming selection is much improved from the last time I looked! Just watched La Grande Illusion.

there's a ton of good stuff! I watched Claire Denis "L'intrus" yesterday <3<3<3.. in the middle of Chéreau's "Gabrielle" right now & am reserving judgment for the moment

"La regle du jeu" is on streaming as well btw

Just starting Dreyer's Vampyr now.

in the middle of Chéreau's "Gabrielle" right now & am reserving judgment for the moment

have been dithering over seeing gabrielle so if you want to add to the chorus please recommend/badmouth

i voted it number one in the films of the 2000s poll. it's a masterpiece. utterly unique and magnificent.

I am getting sick of seeing 'very long wait' for every new movie that comes out. I expect it with huge blockbusters, but even Black Dynamite is showing that to me. This didn't used to happen, and I've been a subscriber for years, and am always quick to return movies, so I don't really get why it's so bad right now. Anyone else think this is worse than it has been?

Yes, started in December for whatever reason. This, combined with their blu-ray premium, their delay of new warners discs, and 15 out of 20 blu-rays being cracked, drove me at least temporarily into the dying arms of Blockbuster. I'm having fun with in store exchanges but I don't think the store is going to be around for much longer. The main downsides to the switch are that Blockbuster shipping turnaround is about a day slower, no console streaming and a few titles aren't available on Blu-ray. Blockbuster also lists many new titles as short or long waits, but they seem to ship faster anyway.

Apparently, all the cracked discs are due to the post office running them through machines. When they get enough complaints, they dispatch a fixer to the branch in question. This seems to be a bigger problem for more fragile blu-ray discs. It's worth noting that I've had nothing cracked from Blockbuster.

I'm really annoyed because I've loved Netflix for so long and recommended them to everyone, but it seems like they've lost their way lately on some pretty critical things.

been seeing the 'very long wait' more and more but it doesn't really bother me, Netflix still beats anything else i'd be doing to get the same fix. only bummer is sometimes by the time i get around to renting a new release it's already playing on HBO or whatever and i feel like it was a waste of a rental.

on my local rental charts, the top 5 horror movies include all 3 Underworld movies. I do not know why that is.

Yes, the streaming capability is one reason I don't just dump them. I feel kind of like I helped make Netflix a monopoly (at least for mail-order movie rentals), and now that it is one, it's getting shitty and there's nothing I can do about it other than "boycott" it by canceling. And then I start thinking... I guess it's not that big a deal if I have to wait a few weeks to see a new movie. It's not just new movies, though. I wanted to watch 'Damages', and for some reason disc 1 of season 1 is 'short wait'.

I hope in a few years, subscription-based streaming services will rule the day. The concept of having to deal with having hard copies of movies or music seems old-fashioned.

seems to me that its most very long wait on new releases, which are always the easiest to torrent? i do fine by torrenting the newest stuff and using netflix for slightly older/more difficult-to-find movies

obv thats not a 'legal' solution but

def. agree that streaming would be my choice for the way of the future. id probably pay the $8/mo im paying right now just for the streaming service without the DVD portion.

thing about torrents is I'd rather watch new movies on my tv instead of my computer monitor. I haven't figured out how to stream HD stuff from my PC to the PS3.

u can't do a monitor cable straight into the TV?

For brand new movies you have to make sure that you have return a movie on the Saturday before the movie's release date. In most cases I will get new releases on the Tuesday they come out if I have an next available movie spot on Monday morning. But yeah sometimes its just a forever wait (Paranormal Activity has been at VERY LONG WAIT since it came out.)

thing about torrents is I'd rather watch new movies on my tv instead of my computer monitor. I haven't figured out how to stream HD stuff from my PC to the PS3.

http://tversity.com/

every torrent i've ever seen looks like garbage and most people watch them on their retarded computer screens. not paying the competley tiny and fair amount of money it takes to have a netflix account is some true savagery imo

hey whiney

not sure who youre arguing with

but im glad you feel passionately about something

I've tried tversity and the windows 7 media server, and it's choppy as fuck. I think it's because Wi-Fi is the only way my PS3 can talk to my PC (my PC is in the other room, and it's not worth moving the whole thing). I've also tried using my laptop to connect directly, but couldn't get it to look right (probably due to super shitty video card in laptop).

Alex, that's a good tip - I'll give that a shot next time. I just want to see Zombieland, dammit. It's been sitting at the top of my queue since it came out.

I got annoyed with occasional wifi (old airport express) choppiness and just use a thumb drive. Make a root level folder called VIDEO and the PS3 will see it and play almost anything.