Monday, December 20, 2010

Initial thoughts on Netflix Streaming

Just opened my Netflix streaming account a few weeks ago and I have some observations:

(1) Parental controls - The parental controls are really lame. Since my entire family uses one account on our TV, I don't want my small children to see content (or names of movies) that are greater than rated PG-13. This has 2 problems:
  • I need to turn off parent controls when I want to view R-rated movies. But it takes HOURS for the switch in parent controls to take effect.
  • Some movies are not rated (like old movies and documentaries). The netflix system can't separate old NR movies from the more ADULT content. So if you disable anything above rated R, you can't see a lot of valid content. And then, if you turn it off, you have to wait hours. Then turn it OFF afterwards, so you kids can't see bad content. Dumb.

(2) Usability - My main beef with the Silverlight plugin that displays movies is that it doesn't remember that I always watch in full screen. So after starting a movie, I have to manually do this.

(3) Selection - Not one single academy award winning movie is available in streaming. All the way back to 1930. Also Christmas classics would be handy this time of year, but they're not there (Rudolph, etc).

(4) Quality: Bad audio on a lot of movies. The video quality is not that great, except for the limited HD content.

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